Mike’s narrative also offers a commentary on undergraduate England in the 1970s and professional London in the 1980s. The first of these is the more successfully rendered; the 1980s passages, with their cast of figureheads (including Margaret Thatcher, Alan Clark and Ken Livingstone) and accounts of meetings with senior press figures, are not as well knitted into the whole and are more clearly an attempt to capture the spirit of the age. However, Faulks’s journalistic past lends them a verisimilitude that goes part of the way towards compensating for their inessential feel, and some of the encounters do give rise to excellent moments, as when a fictional Alan Clark offers Mike an opinion on whether Geoffrey Howe is clever: ‘Howe? Christ, no. I’d let him tie up the codicil to my auntie’s will in Swansea, that’s about all.’
What is perhaps most impressive in this convincing novel is that no matter how much we find out about Mike, he remains as indecipherable as white noise. He may be misogynistic, repressed, gay, straight, evil, emotionally unplugged, mad or sane: all are possible. The only thing we can finally assert is his otherness; while Mike at one stage seems merely a traumatic childhood away from the rest of us, a sense of his great, in one sense almost ‘inhuman’, difference eventually settles upon the reader, and remains disquietingly present for some time after the novel has been finished.
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