The moral dimension of these narratives will not be lost on many authors of the genre. The path of self-discovery taken by the characters often mirrors the personal journey taken by the novelists themselves – hardly surprising, given the old writer’s adage that you should ‘write what you know’, and the rumour that what all bankers are actually doing in all-night meetings is drafting that best-selling debut novel in their heads. Bingham worked for an investment bank which had an underground safe so large it had doors wide enough for two people abreast to walk through. ‘When I saw the scale of it for real I just knew I had to put it in a novel,’ he says. And it’s not just the settings. For those of us who have survived the competitive corporate jungle – and I worked in investment banking for ten years, before writing Something I’m Not – the primitive human impulses at work in corporate or office environments are too juicy to resist skewering in fiction.
E, by Matt Beaumont (erstwhile advertising copywriter), unmasks in email form the dog-eat-dog dynamics of the modern office and, several years ahead of comedian Ricky Gervais’s The Office, offers a wince-making exposé of a company in non-communication meltdown. Lucy Kellaway (a Financial Times journalist) taps a similar vein in Who Moved My BlackBerry? Both novels deploy sharp, black humour to lay bare the greed, narcissism and neurosis lurking in the shadow side of many of us. American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, takes this to its logical, disturbing extreme, satirising a slice of Eighties’ Manhattan.
‘You’re a dead man,’ says Patrick Bateman, Easton Ellis’s psychopath protagonist, to the cab driver relieving him of all his branded possessions.
‘Yeah,’ the cabbie replies, ‘and you’re a yuppie scumbag. Which is worse?’
Which begs the question: is the pro-business bestseller some sort of oxymoron? Does our psyche need mammon to be inherently evil, the bogeyman, the dark side of all of us? A glance at the evidence, from Charles Dickens to Wilbur Smith, would suggest it does. In The Constant Gardener by John Le Carré, the villain is the global pharmaceutical industry, whose unsavoury business practices are destroying lives. In ex-banker John McLaren’s Black Cabs, the ‘baddies’ are the City financiers making money for themselves, whereas the ‘goodies’ are a group of London taxi drivers who plan to play these financiers at their own game, insider trading on information they overhear in their cabs to raise money for a sick child. Narratives driven by money seize our imagination the way fairy tales do, harnessing psychological archetypes and conflicts to explore primitive issues such as greed, envy, revenge, good and evil. Readers become voyeurs of a fascinating, surreal, and desperately insecure world in which the high-risk, high-reward culture exacts a heavy emotional price. Like the celebrities in Hello! or Closer magazines, City characters act out the fantasies of our subconscious, and then we get to see their lives ‘destroyed’ which soothes our repressed envy; lives summed up in the title of the novel by David Charters (my favourite title of the genre), At Bonus Time No-one Can Hear You Scream.
Of course the danger is that such racy fiction is stereotypical. Several bankers I know find the characterisation in such books weak, and the ‘humour’ tame compared with the rapier wit and lightning-speed repartee of the real thing. Instead, they prefer real life accounts like Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis, Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, and Falling Eagle by our own Martin Vander Weyer. Perhaps the time has come, with the air thick with talk of recession, subprime crashes and the credit crunch, for someone to buck the trend and write a pro-Mammon story set in the City. Who knows, such a novel might just trigger a reappraisal of the City’s fragile pathology.
Lucy Beresford is a psychotherapist and author of Something I’m Not.
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