Papering over the cracks

The first thing to be said about this combination of history, autobiography and polemic is how heavy it is — not in the literary sense, though it is by no means light reading, but in the literal sense that it is a surprising weight in the hand. Befitting its title, it is printed on unusually thick, glossy paper, the better to carry a set of beautiful illustrations relating to the development of paper money and the follies and manias connected with it. Befitting its multimillionaire publisher-financier-connoisseur author, the book is an idiosyncratic artefact, a craftsman-made container for the distillate of a lifetime’s observation of the interaction of paper and wealth. In short, it’s a rich man’s book, but none the worse for that.

Born in Sri Lanka and educated in England, Christopher Ondaatje (older brother of the novelist Michael) emigrated to Canada in 1956, was a member of Canada’s 1964 Olympic bobsled team, founded a successful publishing house and went on to make a fortune broking corporate share deals. In 1988, ‘disillusioned with finance’, he sold up and returned to England, where he acquired a historic West Country estate, collected art and wrote books about explorers. He became a benefactor of the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Geographical Society and both the Conservative and Labour parties — the former treated him too arrogantly, so he punished them by giving £2 million to the latter.

A man of parts, then, and a man of opinions: and rather than write a conventional account of his own life, he has chosen to weave his personal story into a thesis about financial markets which ends with a powerful warning. To set the scene, he goes all the way back to the use of papyrus in ancient Egypt and the invention of paper in ancient China; via Gutenberg and Caxton to the Bank of England’s first issues of printed banknotes — redeemable, of course, for gold.