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‘The Mark and the Void,’ by Paul Murray / Review

Illustration by Stephan Schmitz

‘The Mark and the Void,’ by Paul Murray

By Antoine Wilson
December 10, 2015

Paul Murray’s satirical novel of the Irish banking crisis, “The Mark and the Void,” takes place primarily at the International Financial Services Center, a section of Dublin that functions as a tax haven for multinational corporations, a place where billions in assets hide behind brass nameplates in the Transaction House and shadow banks operate hidden from the prying eyes of regulators. It’s anonymous by design. As one of Murray’s characters explains: “We’re in the middle of Dublin, where Joyce set ‘Ulysses.’ But it doesn’t look like Dublin. We could be in London or Frankfurt or Kuala Lumpur.”

The novel’s protagonist, Claude Martingale, is not an Irishman but a Frenchman, though he doesn’t strike the reader as particularly French. In keeping with the setting, he could be from anywhere. Claude works in Dublin as an analyst for the Bank of Torabundo, “passing his days in the service of money; passing most of his nights that way too.” He has no family, no friends, no hobbies, “no life outside of the bank.” Into this colorless existence stumbles a writer named Paul. It’s been years since the publication of Paul’s first novel, “For Love of a Clown,” and he’s looking to get back into the game with a new book. He’s been watching Claude surreptitiously and has decided he would make an ideal protagonist. Claude is flattered, if bemused.

Over lunch, Paul pitches his project to Claude: a novel set in a nowhere place, narrated by nobody in particular, with Dublin, the land of Joyce, stripped of its idiosyncrasies by the global banking system and Claude, at the center, the ultimate contemporary Everyman. He’s “uprooted,” Paul explains, “he’s alone, he’s separated from his friends and family.” That this conceptually solid if culturally anemic setup could also describe the book we’re reading should set off more than a few alarm bells. Murray, whose previous novel was the critically acclaimed “Skippy Dies,” clearly enjoys playing the trickster, albeit the trickster with a weakness for high-concept gags.

Paul suggests that he shadow Claude at the bank: “He says he wants to understand my work completely before looking at any other aspects of my life.” At this point, one should note that Paul’s description of an Everyman is also a description of an ideal mark for a con. And, in fact, Paul has no intention of writing another novel. He is, rather, looking for a way out of his financial troubles via an age-old method, bank robbery.

Despite a pileup of telltale signs, Claude remains blind to Paul’s ulterior motives for an excruciating number of pages. He finally begins to have his doubts with the arrival of Paul’s confederate, the giant Igor, introduced as a poet but crass and porn-obsessed. Yet Claude’s office mates prove even more ingenuous, thrilled by the idea of an actual poet in their midst. For a reader, it’s rather difficult to swallow. The charade comes to an end only after Paul realizes that the bank — being an investment bank — has no physical vault.

He stops showing up, and Claude, having gotten used to his “author” observing his every move, finds himself confronting an existential crisis. Claude sets out in search of Paul, possessed by the idea that he can help the struggling writer find a new angle into the book via a plotline in which the banker helps the writer find a new angle into the book. Cue the involutions of metafiction.

When Claude locates Paul, he’s living with his wife and child in an opulent but half-wrecked apartment in an equally opulent but half-wrecked apartment tower, an abandoned project from the days of the Celtic Tiger, literally coming apart because of pyrite (also known as fool’s gold) in the walls and foundation. Paul, we come to realize, is not only a would-be crook and failed novelist but also a victim of the economic downturn. Whether Claude is an unwitting perpetrator of his downfall is up for debate.

Even after Claude discovers the truth about Paul, they continue to make an odd pair, with Claude, beyond all reason pressuring Paul to actually write his book and Paul (sometimes with Igor’s help) trying to get money via any number of preposterous, and sometimes criminal, schemes.

This scenario is structurally coherent — all the elements are connected in a familiar configuration — but its actual playing out is a mimetic shambles. Claude and Paul behave in ways that are for the most part internally consistent but at the same time don’t seem particularly realistic. As a character, Claude clearly needs Paul to write his book, but the source of that need is baffling, especially in light of Paul’s recurrent betrayals. Even allowing for the concept-forward types who typically populate madcap comedy, Paul and Claude tested my reserves of credulity — and incredulity.

Although the book is weakest when Claude and Paul hew close to caricature, “The Mark and the Void” can often be very funny. In fact, some of its humor is straightforward and laugh-out-loud funny, as when Murray depicts a group of boorish London traders off for a night on the town. Much of the comedy is more conceptual, its satire more cutting. Murray’s novel is a playground of pitches and ideas, few of them realized or realizable: for financial instruments, real-estate developments, dubious websites (Myhotswaitress.com) and potential novels, all forming a sort of echo chamber of hope and failure.

The banking plot, with its conspiracies, reversals and copious objects of ridicule, provides fertile ground for Murray’s talents. At the outset, the Bank of Torabundo’s conservative chief executive — the only reason this institution escaped the most recent round of bubble-bursting — has just been replaced by a “celebrated figure” named Porter Blankly, who comes over from another bank that needed a $50 billion rescue package from the United States government. The move is likened to “pulling the captain of the Titanic out of the water and asking him to skipper your catamaran.” Blankly’s strategy is to acquire other banks, pushing the Bank of Torabundo further and further into debt until it’s too big to fail. Sound familiar? As Jurgen, one of Claude’s German colleagues, suggests: “A sufficiently large bank would create its own reality as opposed to simply reacting to consensus.”

Recurring notes of counter-reality strike at the heart of the novel’s main theme: the ways in which various simulacra pull us out of the so-called real world and into models of that world, and the disastrous consequences that arise when we confuse the two. To articulate this theme, Murray invents an obscure French philosopher called François Texier. Among his aperçus: “We write the encyclopedia to explain the world, and then we leave the world to live in the encyclopedia.” Thus banking crises are born, with their all-too-real consequences.

Behind this novel’s antic machinations lurks a sharply intelligent satire, if one is willing to suspend enough disbelief. In the end, the plot veers toward farce, which, though frothy, seems a more appropriate register for Claude and Paul’s high jinks. Tying everything up, Murray displays considerable architectonic skill, shutting down this wild and unruly book, a solid landing after a bumpy flight.