Published in 2009, this is the first novel that I've tackled by British writer Sebastian Faulks. In the version I listened to, it was very well narrated by Colin Mace (who is a real dab hand at accents).

The story, set in London, unfolds over the seven days leading up to Christmas 2007. It follows the lives of a wide-ranging cast of characters, apparently all in their own worlds, but actually connected in multiple ways.


This is my week leading up to Christmas 2007... A long way from London, on the Great Alpine Road, Victoria, Australia...

There's John Veals, a billionaire hedge fund owner (it's 2007, remember, and the financial world is about to implode). Money is the only thing he understands, and it obsesses him. In every other aspect of his existence, he is narrow, lifeless, and utterly empty. There's his teenage son, Finn, mostly alone in his room, playing computer games, watching the worst of television offerings, and loading his body with pizza, beer, and skunk (I confess I had to look that up, and it turns out it's hybridized marijuana). He ends up experiencing a psychotic episode. And there's John's wife, Vanessa. Lonely, superficial, drinking herself to sleep on the sofa of an evening -- but jolted awake by what happens to her son. (There's a daughter, too, but we don't get to hear much about her. "Whatever" and "sleepovers" just about sum it up.)

Then there's melancholy barrister Gabriel Northwood. He is not quite at home in the world, always a little lost, and pining for an old flame... Until, that is, he meets Jenni, a tube driver who is involved in a case that Gabriel is responsible for.

There's Farooq al-Rashid (nicknamed Knocker), a one-time immigrant from Pakistan to Britain, who has made his fortune in lime pickle, and is about to head to Buckingham Palace to receive an honour. There's his mild and lovable wife, Nasim. And there's his troubled son, Hassan. Raised in Scotland, sporting a Scottish accent, and only too keen to be part of the culture around him, he finds himself rebuffed by it. He turns to politics, seeking out a leftist group that provides simple answers for all problems (if it's international, it's imperialism; if it's domestic, it's economic exploitation). But here, too, he is boxed and labelled, as identity ultimately trumps all other drivers. He eventually turns to a militant version of Islam, where he is groomed to be a suicide bomber.

And there's R. Tranter, a literary critic and wordsmith-at-large. He's a thoroughly embittered man, prepared to viciously condemn something before he's even read it, and capable of the most puerile jealousy. But he's softened, finally, by offers of employment, and the ironic recognition that he is at home not in the contemporary era, but in the world of the 19th century.





There are other characters, too, but they're drawn much more sketchily. Even Spike, the Polish footballer, who is one of the biggies, doesn't get that much attention. Other portrayals are just vignettes. The one with the teacher, for example, offers a horribly believable picture of the complete ghastliness of many contemporary classrooms, where kids have rights but teachers don't, but -- apart from a brief and shadowy encounter towards the end -- we hear no more. Many of the guests at Sophie Topping's dinner party (the set piece that bookends the novel, and situates many of the disparate characters in each other's company) just seem to exist to embody certain points of view.

This is one of the book's weaknesses, I feel. It's a little over-ambitious. You just can't keep that many balls in the air.



But as a satire, it has a crocodile-sized bite. Faulks really knows how to shine a light on and through the most grotesque aspects of everyday contemporary life.

The most outrageous of the satirical elements is the dreadful reality TV show, where people suffering from mental illness are "advised" by "experts". There is truly a piling up of horrors here: Their cases are first heard by a panel of "celebrity" judges playing for laughs; the public is also encouraged to weigh in with advice; and finally, the "contestants" get to spend time together, under the watchful eye of the cameras, at the "Barking Bungalow". It's brutal. And exaggerated, of course. Yet I've read about enough TV shows to know where it comes from. Faulks hasn't created this ghastliness out of thin air.

But he has many other targets. The sheer criminality of the finance game, obviously, where financiers raise charitable funds for old people with one hand, while stripping pension funds with the other. (I found the level of detail on the financial stuff a little tedious. Clearly, Faulks did his homework, but since 2009 I guess we've all seen movies like The Big Short, and can grasp the big picture without needing the minutiae.)

He also skewers the way literacy has become a tradable item. Tranter, for example, is employed by a snobby private school to correct the spelling and grammar of the teachers' reports... There are loads of little details on this theme (the constant misuse of terms relating to mental health; the girl band hit entitled "Between you and I"...).

Indeed, Faulkner is scathing about the selling out of education as a whole. As Gabriel puts it: "We chose to know less."





Yet books provide a major link throughout the story. Gabriel is an avid reader, as is Jenni. Tranter provides muscle for the book group in which Vanessa Veals and some of the other characters participate. And Knocker also employs Tranter to tutor him in book lore before he meets the queen. (One of the most poignant scenes in the novel is Knocker's unexpected capacity to move the hard-boiled Tranter with his recitation of Betjeman.)

More generally, words, and their slipperiness, form a thematic link... The words of the Koran, for example, which have such different effects on Gabriel, Knocker and his wife, Hassan, and Shahla; or the shadowy financial rumours, all armoured with plausible deniability, spread by Veals. The most solid words are those heard by Gabriel's mentally disturbed brother, Adam, who has absolutely no capacity to doubt their authenticity and reliability.

Over and above all else, however, this is a book about parallel realities. Money that doesn't exist; virtual reality games that compete with, and often take over from, "real reality"; the voices, heard to Adam alone, that shape his reality; the alternative universe of the religious propagandists, and the drug-takers, and the TV anchors... To a person, they are peddling a different form of reality, creating a cacophony of influences.





I wasn't sure about the repeated motif of the unlit bicycle that charges towards people, forcing them to leap out of the way... It felt a little too heavily symbolic in what is basically a very down-to-earth book. But ultimately, it is one of these apparitions that jolts Hassan off his suicide bomb path.

Nor was I sure about the whole Hassan story. On the one hand, I like what Faulks tried to do, whereas others, like Gregory Cowles, didn't: "It tells you everything you need to know about the politics of this book, and the reflexive populism of our time, that the capitalist is more reliably loathsome than the jihadist... One man hopes to profit from a bank’s self-inflicted wounds, the other hopes to murder psychiatric patients, and the investor is the bad guy?"

But Veals IS more loathsome... Hassan, though misguided (to put it mildly), at least has a broader aim; whereas Veals has only his pocket and the thrill of the chase in mind. Hassan is capable of backing away (albeit as a result of coincidences that do strain credulity somewhat); whereas Veals forges on oblivious. Hassan is interested in justice; whereas Veals shows no awareness that there is such a thing. And Hassan can love; whereas Veals is incapable of such emotion. Faulks's point, I think, is not that we should NOT condemn the suicide bomber (whose action is indefensible), but that we should also condemn, and just as vociferously, the villains who wear smart clothes, turn up at swanky dinner parties, and ruin the lives of millions.

On the other hand, I'm always a little allergic to attempts to "voice" people who are very different from us. Especially minorities. You don't get acknowledgements with audio-books, so I'm not sure what Faulks drew on for this portrait. I hope his sources were multi-faceted.

The two romances are sweet, and it's good to be reminded that amidst all the artificiality and sheer stupidity and appalling venality of modern life, there is still love... But these relationships are just a tad implausible. Are Jenni and Gabriel not just too different? And that dialogue between Shahla and Hassan at the end definitely has a cringe factor about it...





There's no denying that the book feels very, very bleak. Shahla, Hassan's good friend and ally, sums it up like this: "There's nothing grand about the modern world, is there?"

And, as Cowles puts it, "When a novelist tells multiple stories, it’s common to describe him as a weaver, knotting threads into a tapestry. Faulks, though, is more like a bomb-maker, twisting wires; we keep reading not so much because we want to see the big picture but because we’re pretty sure something is going to blow up."

Faulks is exaggerating for effect. There's still much, of course, that's beautiful and wonderful about our world. And it's ultimately not good to be too much on our high horse about the way other people live, and the choices they make. There's quite enough them-and-us in society already.

But the book did remind me very much of an essay by Samuel Alexander that I came across last year:

"At least since Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961), it has been understood that the idea of (in)sanity is an evolving, socially constructed category. Not only does the medical validity of mental health diagnoses and treatments shift with the times, but what has been judged 'sane' in one era has the potential to blur into what is not in another -- and without announcement. This can disguise the fact that social practices or patterns of thought that may once have been considered healthy may now be properly diagnosed as unhealthy... A society might go insane without being aware of its own degeneration...

"[Erich Fromm] felt that society needed certain objective conditions to be sane, including environmental sustainability. If too many of humankind’s most basic needs were not being met despite unprecedented capacity, he felt it would be proper to declare a society sick, even if the behaviour producing the sickness was widespread and validated by its own internal cultural logic...

"Scientists warn that current trajectories of climate heating are not compatible with civilisation as we know it... And yet nothing is more 'normal' than hopping into a fossil-fuelled car or consuming products shipped around the world to satisfy the carboniferous desires of affluent society...

"If an individual knowingly destroyed the conditions of his or her own existence, we’d question their sanity. If a mother only fed her children if she could make a profit, we’d doubt the soundness of her mind. If a father took all the household wealth and left the rest of the family in destitution while building bombs in the basement that could destroy the neighbourhood, we’d call him psychopathic. And yet these are characteristics of our society as a whole..."

Ouch...