Plump and perky, the 22-year-old blogs for a local Cornish newspaper. When she's sent off to interview a local Gaelic playwright, she inadvertently stumbles upon a scoop — massive financial fraud at one of the nation's most prestigious private banks.
Tubal & Co's history stretches back almost 350 years and its clients include Prince Andrew and the billionaire widow of the first man to invent perforated toilet paper. None of that has insulated it from toxic assets totalling $800 million. While its ailing former chairman, Sir Harry Tubal, fades away at his villa in the South of France, his son Julian must hide a £250 million loan from the ratings agencies, propping the bank up long enough to sell it.
The name Tubal, Cartwright notes, "gives off the low humming sound of immense privilege". Accordingly, he freights the novel with sensual surface detail, be it almond blossom tossing in a warm Provençal breeze, or menus of crayfish salad, noisettes of lamb, and clafoutis.
Cartwright has a flair for the unsettling, too — Sir Harry's scrambled post-stroke speech, for instance, sounds "as though he were speaking to parrots in their own language". Yet there are no real villains in this wry parable, which humanises — and also philosophises about — the financial crisis. And so, when Julian lies awake at night, wondering where the money went, he knows it's less of a banking question than "an existential matter". The money simply vanished, if it ever existed at all. Who is to blame, then? Perhaps the hedgies. Perhaps the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose bell curve persuaded Julian that there could be such a thing as risk-free speculation. But most likely a particularly contemporary strand of greed — the kind that's encapsulated in the novel's title.
The South African-born novelist also touches on something at once more local and more profound: "The English have lost faith in the idea of absolute standards," he observes. It's a sentiment echoed by Mc-Afee's Honor, who notes that: "Truth has been reduced to the subjective." Novels are intrinsically subjective — it's crucial to their appeal — yet they are also respecters of universal truths. Happily, that remains unchanged regardless of the size of their author's advance, and whether you choose to read them in their ink-and-paper or pixelated incarnations.
