Marco Timoleon, as he is called in full throughout the novel, is The Richest Man in the World, and it is the occasion of his daughter Sofia’s twenty-fifth birthday. To celebrate, he organises a party on his private island and secretly includes amongst the invitees a doctor, a nurse and an anaesthetist, whom he has asked to perform an abortion in one of the guest bedrooms. Sofia, Marco Timoleon has discovered through his private investigator, is pregnant and while she is delighted by the news, he does not approve of the father-to-be. The tycoon, who does not have long to live, wants to ensure that his empire will be inherited by the heir of his choice. Also at the party is Ian Forster, Marco Timoleon’s official biographer, who happens to be Sofia’s lover. It is at this point that The Birthday Party begins; to quote Bette Davis from All About Eve, ‘fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.’ 

Not even after take-off can our seatbelts be loosened, despite the fact that the party does not get going until the end of the book. We are indeed heading into a bumpy night, but there are enough twists and turns along the way to make us wonder how and if we will ever get there. As we wait for the guests to arrive, Panos Karnezis, who is a wonderfully gifted story-teller, steers us back through the tycoon’s strange and lonely childhood in Izmir, Asia Minor, where his father disappeared when he was a boy; taking us then to Buenos Aires, where he reinvented himself as rich and impervious to pain, to New York, where his success as a dodgy businessman began, through his two unsuccessful marriages, the mysterious death of his first wife, the accident which killed their son, and finally describing the growth of his international fame and notoriety. The story spans from the 1920s to 1975, and Karnezis unfolds Marco Timoleon’s life in seductive detail, tripping up only once, but badly, when he describes Colonel Stanley Nicholls, the man who saved Timoleon from starvation in Buenos Aires, as ‘a compassionate Quaker who had spent several years in the Middle East as a young army officer’. Committed pacifists, no Quaker has ever joined the army; it is as if Karnezis had described a Rabbi working in a pork processing unit.

Any resemblance between Marco Timoleon and Aristotle Onassis is surely deliberate: both are shipping magnates of Mediterranean origin who marry a jet-setting American princess; both have unhappy daughters who battle endlessly against fat, addiction and depression. Both inhabit the homeless half-world of the mega-rich, and sack and promote their friends and family as though they were employees. A monarch without a throne, Marco Timoleon rules the seas over which he wanders like the ancient mariner, burdened by the past and leaving behind him the flotsam and jetsam of chaos.

In Marco Timoleon, Kanezis has created an entirely believable character which is why the improbable plot works so well; this, one feels, must be what it is like to have all the money in the world and no sense of who you are. The story of how Marco Timoleon became a monster is complicated by the ubiquitous Ian Forster, who will do anything to uncover the true nature of his biographical subject and whose presence adds both veracity (we begin to suspect Forster is the book’s narrator) and menace to the plot. The complex relation between biographer and biographee recalls the one brilliantly described in The Lying Tongue by Andrew Wilson, also out this summer and equally gripping in its exploration of biographical morality.

The birthday party itself, by the time we return there in the final pages, is a cocktail of Pinter’s play of the same name, the party thrown by Mrs Dalloway and one of those surreal affairs laid on by Jay Gatsby to which he doesn’t bother turning up. To say what happens will ruin the night; just make sure you refasten the seatbelt.