Faulks has mentioned in an interview that Orwell was his "patron saint" for this novel, and thus his teachers inhabit an exaggerated, satirical world in which  "English had been fused with modern foreign languages and media studies under the banner of communications", and "training had focused on the politics of race, gender, class, with hardly a mention of pupil management or lessons". But this is incoherent because most of the other spheres are thoroughly researched and dealt with realistically. The hedge fund manager short-sells and exploits the sub-prime market. The young Islamist reads Sayed Qutb and meets a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir. The footballers listen to iPods, date glamour models, eat a lot of pasta and draw 1-1 with other teams. Faulks's version of Big Brother grotesquely gathers clinically insane people together for televised "treatment", but this is only because the character who watches it is a skunk addict who (the newspapers have been warning us) will develop schizophrenia himself.

The book is full of laboured correspondences like this. Elsewhere, in order to hammer home a comparison he is making between literalist Islam and schizophrenia, Faulks has one patient's inner voice tell him things like: "You can take up to three wives...if you sleep with another man's wife you'll be...punished for all time. In the flames."

The best romance in the novel is a defunct one which has left a single physical trace: a photograph entombed in the memory of an obsolete mobile phone which, its battery depleted, can never again be brought back to life. This is Faulks giving modernity his best shot, and it certainly isn't a miss, but the trope itself hints at a struggle that he has, with the book as a whole, ultimately lost. It is very clear, on the local scale, that he has been immersed in the past for most of his writing life. Hassan, on the Tube on his way to buy explosives, notices "a black-skinned youth with feet in padded white trainers the size of small boats". If this had been written by Sebastian Faulks 15 years ago, or by a historical novelist 100 years from now, then perhaps there would be some mileage in an observation about black boys' tastes in trainers (or the hilariousness of trainers in general). But no one these days, not even an alienated Islamist, is taken aback by a pair of Nikes. Faulks sees today's London from very far away and only faintly makes it out. His imaginary version of it turns out to be as wooden and unrewarding as the various fantasy worlds and escapist trips he has picked out for condemnation.