BOOK OF THE DAY
The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray review – messy, profound and hilarious
Wednesday 22 July 2015
Afew years ago, Paul Murray’s second novel, the highly acclaimed Skippy Dies, found its way into the holiday packing of David Cameron, whose interest may have been piqued by a tale of dark goings-on at an elite boarding school. On that basis, perhaps George Osborne will shortly be snapped on the beach with his nose deep in The Mark and the Void, which is set in the everywhere-and-nowhere world of global high finance, and contains some shudderingly topical inflections (“We’re like lepers out there,” says one trader, as his overstretched bank goes south. “We’re like Greece”). But without prejudging the chancellor’s literary stamina, one suspects he might quail at the portrayal of a group of cut-throat chancers inventing increasingly bizarre and improbable mathematic models to keep their ludicrous and dangerous game afloat.
The novel takes place, notionally, in Dublin, but you would hardly know it; its action is confined to a few oppressive interiors, chief among them the offices of the Bank of Torabundo, an investment bank that has escaped the ravages of the global financial crisis thanks to its now departed CEO’s aversion to both the volatile property market and to dabbling in derivatives (explained by one banker thus: “If you do it in the bookies, it’s a bet … If you pay some 23-year-old in an Armani suit two hundred grand to go to the window for you, it’s a derivative”).
His place has been taken by the totemically awful Porter Blankly, whose presence is felt via the gnomic mass emails he sends his staff. “Think counterintuitive” is one, although that soon means going beyond the counterintuitive – finding ways to “reverse the polarity of losses”, or continue to make money even when things fail. Confused? Actually, you needn’t be, because Murray does an excellent job of exposing the Ponzi schemes and endless recapitalisations of failing institutions as the simple confidence tricks gussied up by gobbledegook that they really are.
In the middle of all this is the novel’s narrator, Claude Martingale, a French business analyst with a burning desire for anonymity who has fetched up in Ireland (his surname is itself the name of a complex financing model, in which you increase your risk when you lose, in the hope that you will win at some point in the future). But there’s a problem: he has attracted the attentions of “Paul”, a black-clad figure who eventually introduces himself as a writer in search of an everyman.
Indeed: it’s a meta-novel, and it goes meta from the very first page. If you hate that kind of thing, The Mark and the Void will be a difficult read, because it’s replete with tricksiness: a vanished philosopher called Francois Texier, himself the author of a book entitled La Marque et Le Vide; a bewitching waitress-cum-artist, Ariadne, creator of the “Simulacrum” series of paintings; the hall of mirrors between Claude and Paul, as Paul struggles to craft the Frenchman’s life into a believable fictional artefact.
But stay with it. Even this isn’t “real”. Paul at first presents himself as a novelist on his uppers, his previous novel, For Love of a Clown, eclipsed by one Bimal Banerjee’s far better received The Clowns of Sorrow. But his idea for a novel of high finance is quickly scuppered by the irreality and tedium of its subject matter: “In the past a novel didn’t always need a story,” he explains to Claude. “You could just make it about a day in somebody’s life. But life then meant an entirely different thing. It meant people, movement, activity. You guys in front of your screens all day long, selling each other little bits of debt – it’s a whole different order of nothing.”
But it turns out that the proposed novel is itself a front: Paul is using Claude to further his far more plausible means of getting money, which include a dating, or rather stalking, website called myhotswaitress.com (the name myhotwaitress had already been taken). Discovered, he is asked whether he ever intended to write the novel. No, he replies derisively, “I don’t do that shit any more.”
The Mark and the Void is a mess; there is too much going on – plotlines eating themselves, diversions into anthropology (Torabundo is a fictional Pacific island that used to be a gift economy but is now a tax haven), skits on the literary world (most amusing of which is Apeiron, an online retailer where you can give someone a rating of two thistles and a swastika, which is bad, or a lightning bolt and a Buckingham Palace, which is good). The author-as‑character is, as ever, a high-wire act whose wobbles are occasionally extremely annoying, not least because one suspects they are supposed to be, hence catapulting us into the territory of the meta-meta-novel.
And yet its successes are serious and impressive. Fans of Skippy Dies and Murray’s first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, will not be surprised to hear that it is very funny, its author’s fluency spooling out in joke after joke. About time, says Jurgen, the German banker who was once a member of Gerhard and the Mergers, “one of the best reggae and rocksteady crews on the Bavarian financial scene”, that culture focused on his industry: “It will be a chance to tell our side of the story. Certainly it is time bankers were recognised by the art world. Given that we buy most of the actual art, it is frustrating to be continually misrepresented by it.”
Those with more earthy humorous taste might also enjoy the arrival of Paul’s sidekick Igor, poet and art historian. (“Lately I have watch excellent film about Paris,” he says to Claude, by way of small talk. “In this film, three horny guys are going there and diddle many French prostitutes. Title of film is, Ass Menagerie II: French Connection. You have seen?”)
But there is profundity beyond the laughter, not least in the book’s depiction of the bleak emptying-out of a country. Rainswept plazas, crumbling Celtic Tiger penthouses, tottering banks surrounded by protestors dressed up as zombies; this is a Dublin far from that most famous novel “about a day in somebody’s life”, Ulysses. Irish idiom – apart from a stray “lookit” or two – is erased; the French, German, Greek, Russian and Australian characters could be anywhere, except for a moment in which Claude finds himself on an unexpected journey: “And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, exophthalmic … ” A different kind of Angela’s Ashes.
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