Daily grind

This vast novel, well-plotted and gripping throughout, is the first that Sebastian Faulks has set in our time. It is a state of the nation book, and what a state we seem to be in: if Faulks is less kind to the contemporary than he has been to the past, we cannot blame him, for he is only reporting what he sees.

We follow a large cast of characters around their daily lives in London, in the week before Christmas 2007. There is a venal hedge-fund manager and his neglected son, a skunk-smoking, reality TV-obsessed teenager; a mean-spirited book reviewer; an Islamic youth who gets recruited into a suicide-bombing cell; a well-educated but slightly ineffectual lawyer; an underground train driver; and a Polish footballer, newly signed to a top London club. The footballer is perhaps the least convincing, a character defined only by his desire for ‘a few pork sausages or a beef goulash with sour cream’ and attractive women. As befits the age, the Tube driver, Jenni Fortune, is the half-West Indian daughter of a single mother, raised in a tower block; while the Islamic youth, of Pakistan-ruled Kashmiri descent, starts life in Scotland, where his father ran a business making lime pickle.

Faulks describes an era of wilful stupidity, where computer spell check and search machines have ‘remodelled the world so that ignorance is not really a disadvantage’. Opinion triumphs over knowledge; sensation rules. Television is dominated by boorish chefs and thin models with brand names. A much mentioned TV show depicts patients with serious mental illnesses being deprived of medication in a camera-filled bungalow. Financial institutions are unregulated and utterly cynical: ‘bankers had detached their activites from the “real” world … profit was no longer related to growth or increase … the amount of money to be made by financiers also became detached from normal logic.’