Sebastian FaulksRandy Quan
It was a funny thing," muses a character in Sebastian Faulks's new novel, "how everyone you met these days seemed not just to be wealthy but insanely, ineffably, immeasurably rich."
"Funny" is one word for it, though, on the evidence here, not one Faulks himself subscribes to. On the contrary, the insanely rich - and the banking system behind them - are the prime targets of A Week in December, his bristling indictment of the world as he finds it in the frenzied first decade of the 21st century.
Against the backdrop of a world fractured by greed, stupidity, isolation, ambition and madness, Faulks introduces his cast of characters, all going about their business during one fateful week in 2007, unaware of - well, much, actually. Too much.
A dinner party to which most of the 20-odd characters are invited is the loose framing device the novel employs, but what really connects them is an inability to inhabit reality (as it's generally defined).
So we have Gabriel Northwood, a thoughtful, perhaps too thoughtful, barrister in his late 30s; he is nursing a broken heart - nursing it a bit too fervently, some feel. That's his escape.
Hassan al-Rashid, the wealthy, disaffected son of loving and attentive parents, is well on his way to fanaticism of the religious stripe, having joined the Muslim Youth Coalition, your garden-variety cabal of wannabe jihadis (they "claimed to talk less … and to bomb more") who aim to lead humankind to enlightenment. They plan to do so, naturally, by blowing humankind to smithereens; their reality is grievance.
Adam, Gabriel's elder brother, schizophrenic and hospitalized: His reality is entirely self-generated and impenetrable by others.
Neither last nor least, and in a category unto himself, is hedge-fund manager John Veals. A monomaniac and a boor, a man so profligate in his use of the F and C words (and I do not mean Faith and Church), he is almost enough to make me forswear cursing. Veals "had no interests outside the acquisition of money."
There are others, though one, dyspeptic book reviewer Ralph Tranter, seems to have been provided purely for comic relief (and perhaps to tickle the British literati). With his carefully nurtured sense of Schadenfreude, Tranter "was interested only in bad reviews. Crash was what he wanted: crash and burn ..." Constitutionally unable to stomach the works of his contemporaries, Tranter takes refuge in his 2,000-volume library, and his biliousness.
Overhanging all is the threat of imminent catastrophe, locally, in the form of a series of bombings Hassan's group has planned in central London, and globally, via an economic meltdown much like that which convulsed the (real) world last fall, and in which Veals will play his nefarious part.
Faulks, who made a name for himself exploring the First World War in Birdsong (1993) and the Second in Charlotte Gray (1998), has, after a surprise turn in 2007's Engleby, returned to the contemporary world with a vengeance, and he has found it sorely wanting. There is little that is not flattened under the mallet of his indignation: television, pop music, modern art, the Internet, religion, education, the financial-services industry. His outrage is manifest, and his characters do not wear it lightly.
Adam is clinically psychotic; and 22-year-old Hassan channels the almighty through his incendiary ideology. The line between psychosis and religious extremism is made clear. (Lest we miss the point, Faulks leads with a quotation from psychiatrist Thomas Szasz: "If you talk to God, you are praying. If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.")
Money mania is no different, Faulks implies. Veals, one of "a new breed of fanatic," is single-mindedly intent on bringing down a major British bank - the downfall of the global economy will be but a happy byproduct - and is clearly meant to be a composite of all the real-life banking magnates, CEOs, hedge-funders and sundry other financiers who brought the world to its knees last fall. Gabriel, dismayed, notes that "somehow money had become the only thing that mattered. When had this happened? … When had respectable people given themselves over full-time to counting zeroes?" Clearly, this is Faulks's question too.
The trouble with fanatics is that, being one-dimensional, they're boring. Hassan's estrangement, though sympathetically depicted, is not quite credible, and as for Veals, he is a one-note monster. Faulks states outright that no psychology will explain him: "There were no 'formative' incidents that made him set his face against the world, no early loss or trauma for which he needed to compensate."
Still, Faulks does not rule out the possibility of redemption; even Tranter is given a soft landing. Love is possible, between mother and son, husband and wife, brother and brother, lover and lover: It is real, it will heal.
A Week in December is a good story, well written, comic in parts, but my how Faulks shakes his fist at the world. Had he only let his anger steep, he would have emerged with something not mellower but rather subtler, deeper, far more powerful.
Kathleen Byrne, a Toronto-based book reviewer, is constitutionally able and willing to stomach the work of her contemporaries.