BOOK OF THE DAY: A Week In DecemberBy Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson 392pp, £12.99.
IN HIS latest novel, A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks brings his sweeping gaze to bear on a contemporary London in freefall.
The author made his name for pitching his characters' stories against epic backdrops with 1993's Birdsong. The ambitious scope and intent of this novel, his 10th, demand of Faulks a virtuoso act of focus-pulling, as he shifts from panoramic views of the state of modern British society to meticulously detailed studies of a Dickensian cast of characters.
Split into seven parts (one for each day), the book opens as the wife of a newly elected MP draws up the table plan for a glittering dinner party to be thrown the following Saturday – by which time a bank will have been brought down, a literary career decided, love affairs embarked upon and a terrorist plot played out. Of all the characters, most attention is lavished on John Veals, a hedge fund manager whose ruthless brilliance at making billions at others’ expense provides the author with ample opportunity to deliver a withering indictment of the financial world’s murkier dealings.
Veals is without emotions, “a creature whose heart beat only to market movements”, who as a result leaves the reader cold. It is in sections where his “positions” are exhaustively explained that the plot drags – the unfortunate flip side of an evidently vast amount of research.
Another issue du jourtackled head on is that of Islamic fundamentalism, told through the character of Hassan al-Rashid.
Like many young British Muslims, Hassan is disillusioned by the world of his peers, with its internet porn and reality TV, and Faulks deals with his alienation and insidious slide into fundamentalism in a convincing enough manner.
However, when he veers into plodding analysis of the Koran and the reasoning behind acts of violence, the story again loses momentum, with the quasi- political passages reading more like sermonising by the author than a young man’s private thoughts. Hassan’s parents, however – Farooq, a kind-hearted chutney millionaire, and his wife Nasim – represent a gentler Islam, and are probably the most likeable characters in the book.
Meanwhile, all over the teeming city, the lives of others are played out. The most enjoyable creation is the bilious literary critic R Tranter, who dishes out lacerating reviews of his contemporaries – and what he calls “Oirish Twaddle” – while secretly craving acceptance by the establishment (and though Faulks avers that Tranter is purely fictional, many in the literary world would disagree).
We also meet Jenni Fortune, a Tube driver whose real life is merely filler between forays into a virtual online community; the decent and bookish barrister Gabriel Northwood; Finn, a skunk-addicted teenager; Spike, a Polish footballer – the list goes on. Connected by an ingenious web of associations and coincidences (at times overstretched), the characters are also united by a creeping detachment from reality – whether Jenni’s retreat into fantasy, Veals’s trading in billions of make-believe funds, or Finn’s smoking himself into oblivion – and this seems to be Faulks’s overriding concern about the society he depicts.
As one character puts it: “There’s nothing grand about the modern world, is there?”
Although chiefly satirical in tone, the novel is not without poignant moments, and these are reminders of what a deft chronicler of human frailty Faulks can be. But the pendulum- swing from earnest observation to scathing send-up detracts from the overall achievement.
While masterfully paced and researched (the sheer amount of information compressed into it is remarkable, and the plot in the second half surges along), A Week in Decemberultimately suffers from its grand ambition, which goes to show that even a writer as gifted as Faulks can sometimes spread himself too thin.
Catherine Heaney is a contributing editor to the Gloss magazine