A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
Cleverly plotted, this novel features a number of connected characters moving toward a disaster set to strike during the dinner party planned by Sophie, the wife of the newest MP. In spite of their immense wealth, the guests are an unproductive lot. As their hostess reflects, “Apart from Farooq al-Rashid, who’d shifted tons of limes from the groves of Mexico and Iran,” none of the guests has “engaged with anything that actually existed.”
As the story gears up, the reader enjoys Faulks’s humour and social commentary while meeting a motley array of characters. Every so often, in another part of London, a lone cyclist speeds by, almost clipping someone. We don’t learn why until the end.
An ultra wealthy and unscrupulous hedge fund manager ignores his wife and children while he makes yet more money. His wife broods over how dangerously the financial world has transformed itself, so that profit is “no longer related to growth.” She concludes that to flourish in this semi-virtual world, people like her husband have become “in some profound and personal way, detached.” To continue their irresponsible behaviour, they must suppress their natural humanity, cultivating “a kind of functional autism.” Meanwhile, alone in his room upstairs, their teenage son is courting disaster.
The exhibition of the fashionable and wealthy artist Liam Hogg is another example of ludicrous excess. His papier-mâché cow, made from sixty thousand fifty-pound notes and bedecked with lutetium, “the world’s most precious metal,” is on sale for eight million pounds. Rather than focus on the art, political wife Sophie casts her eye over the fashionable clothing, which includes organdies, devores, fur and cashmere, as well as some “carefully ripped denim” and “rebel biker outfits” worn with “pre-distressed boots.”
Bankers and artists are not the only ones without conscience. Media people make money from a quasi-reality show that exploits mental patients, and when disaster strikes on camera, they think only of how to profit from this unfortunate development.
Literary critic Ralph Tranter, though not wealthy, is vain and snobbish. Flattered to receive a proposal from a good school, he crosses the cobbles ringing the grassy quadrangle and passes beneath an ancient stone arch into an inner courtyard “ivied with age and bogus distinction.” At their meeting, the Head makes “a slightly embarrassing request.” Swearing the critic to silence and assuring him that “other illustrious schools do the same thing,” he engages Tranter to edit the reports written by the pupils. He is not to change them, “merely to correct the worst errors of grammar and syntax and all those of spelling.” Relieved to see there is “still money in literacy,” Tranter jumps at the chance to augment the meagre income he gets from reviewing books.
Tranter seizes another financial opportunity when the lime pickle magnate receives an invitation to Buckingham Palace to receive the OBE. Fearing the Queen might consider him uncultured, he hires Tranter to tutor him in literary conversation. Though somewhat preoccupied with the OBE caper, Farooq and his wife Naseem still worry about their overly religious son. Yet they have no idea how to help him, nor do they dream of the enormity of the trouble he’s courting.
My favourite story is that of Gabriel, a depressed barrister with barely enough work to make ends meet. He looks at the world around him and wonders when people “stopped viewing money as a means to various enjoyable ends and started to view it as the end itself.” His life takes a fresh turn when a case brings him face to face with Jenni. A Tube train driver, she is practical and plain-spoken, and Gabriel is delighted to discover that as well as playing a virtual reality game, she enjoys reading. When she tells him she is impressed with his knowledge, Gabriel is modest about what he knows, yet glad to discuss ideas with the intelligent Jenni, who describes her schooling as “pretty shit.” Considering himself “lucky enough to be educated at ta time when teachers still thought children could handle knowledge,” he opines that recently the world has been remodelled “so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage.”
This book a treat. Faulks takes on the more egregious excesses of contemporary cultures with tongue in cheek humour. He raises serious issues including the power and corruption of the international financial industry, the weakening of educational institutions, the damaging effects of mistaking virtual reality for the real thing, and the dangers of moral and religious certitude. Gabriel, whose brother suffers from schizophrenia, feels that what he’s read in the Koran “with its sequence of ‘heard’ instructions…Is no more bizarre that the alternative realities inhabited by people of the twenty-first century.”