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.’

Even food and drink come under Faulks’ relentless fire. American-owned cafés with long queues sell ‘sour, expensive coffee, glutinous muffins’ while, on a cross-Channel ferry (observes the young Muslim), the passengers are ‘so fat that they could barely manage to get the trays full of lager and crisps back to their tables … the younger ones sprawled on the red seats with their pierced bellies showing as they rolled down in lard layers over their low-cut jeans’.

Conversely, at a swanky London art opening, ‘morsels of food — raw shark, carpaccio of suckling pig’ are ‘offered on a perspex tray’.

Literary gossips have already got their knickers in a twist as to whether Faulks’ bilious book reviewer is based on a real critic: D. J. Taylor and John Walsh have been suggested as possible models, and one might posit David Sexton or Sam Leith.

No doubt the possible identity of the ghastly hedge-fund manager will set tongues wagging, too. But Sebastian Faulks is not, I think, interested in producing a roman-a-clef as much as in satirising the way we live now. There are two problems, here.

The first is that some of the characters feel rather flat. Jenni the Tube driver , with ‘her deep, dark eyes’, is introduced as a voracious reader, whose favourite writers are Agatha Christie and Edith Wharton: ‘she read with undifferentiated glee — philosophy or airport novels’. But nothing she says or feels for the rest of the novel bears this out. The Islamic youth; the brittle Holland Park hedge-fund wife, with her hair-do, quaffing solitary glasses of white Burgundy while her children are ignored; the genial pickle-maker: none of these people are entirely real.

The second problem is that Faulks’ satirical version is almost too accurate. A fictional artist who makes a life-size cow out of bank notes and rare metal is not funnier — nor sheds light on — a real artist who pickles cows and studs a human skull with diamonds. Can anything be worse, on television, than Big Brother and so-called celebrities eating live grubs in a jungle? One final niggle: the best line in the book is nicked from a Joni Mitchell song, with no attribution.

These, though, are minor gripes. At over 500 pages, the ambition and scope of the book are to be applauded. The conclusion is suitably nail-biting and, pleasingly, love triumphs. Sebastian Faulks has probably got another best-seller on his hands.