Despite Charlie’s ghastliness, it was refreshing to read about a confident go-getter, who wasn’t thwarted by the kind of neurasthenic angst suffered by so many characters in literary fiction. Learning about the world of high finance and its misogynist inhabitants was fascinating. Oddly, considering money matters are usually as interesting to me as watching paint dry, it was the subplot of Charlie’s lovelife that began to pall. When the action pulled away from the cut and thrust of banking, the cracking narrative pace began to falter. Charlie’s colleague, Madison, aka Coffee Teeth, is a far more nuanced character than his posh bleeding-heart liberal girlfriend, Jo, and his grand amour, the French femme fatale, Vero. Cassandra-esque Madison predicts the collapse of the banking system but nobody listens or is grateful.
Though Preston’s prose is at times glib and his dialogue weak (his characters speak with unrealistic hyper-articulacy and descriptiveness), he should be applauded for bringing to life a world that is generally only written about in terms of catastrophic but dry figures in news stories.
The most confident and accomplished of these four debuts is Rupture by Simon Lelic. Samuel Szajkowski is a gentle, highly-intelligent history teacher in a London comprehensive. One summer morning he walks into the school assembly and opens fire, killing three pupils and one teacher before turning the gun on himself.
The build-up to this tragedy is pieced together through witness interviews conducted by the young policewoman in charge of the case, Detective Inspector Lucia May. Samuel’s sad mitigating story of bullying at the hands of his pupils and fellow teachers is intercut with Lucia’s own experience of bullying by her sexist colleagues at the Met. Lelic’s economical, oblique style successfully encourages the reader to work alongside Lucia to understand what has happened. He captures the different tones of characters’ voices brilliantly and the novel is a cool, controlled view of various kinds of institutionalised cruelty and corruption.
At times I wanted more detail about both Lucia’s and Samuel’s lives, as, unlike Michael Nath, for example, Simon Lelic is not a sensual writer who revels in the fabric of experience. But, overall, his restraint is admirable and Rupture has none of the common self indulgences of debut novels. He is definitely a writer to watch.
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