Martin Baker, the UK journalist – he worked for several years at the International Herald Tribune in Paris as one of his stints – is someone who has realised that there is an untapped seam out there to be mined: thrillers about the world of finance. I have often myself wondered why, considering how much news is written about financial speculators these days, that there have not been more novels with speculators and the like as the main characters. There are some exceptions: there is Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of The Vanities; there is, of course, Ayn Rand’s great celebration of capitalism in Atlas Shrugged, although the book is more about industry than money-lending. The novel Cash McCall is a neglected 1950s classic. Occasionally financiers feature in other novels but that is pretty much it. As for movies, ask anyone about a fictional presentation of a Wall Street speculator or City buyout king, and they will say Wall Street, with the glorious Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas. And he was supposed to be a baddie, remember.
Mr Baker wants to plug a bit of a gap and he has written a thriller called Meltdown, which came out a little while ago. I picked up my signed copy and a few days ago, I read it. I am afraid I have to say the book comes as a bit of disappointment. If a movie is ever made out of it, it could be toe-curlingly embarrassing unless they sort out some of the plot and characters.
Without giving away a rambling plot, the protagonist is a brilliant young Oxford academic called Samuel Spendlove, who is persuaded to be employed by some shady media types to spy on a bank in Paris, to discover the doings of a proprietary trader who makes gazillions of dollars on deals, to report back on his affairs, and presumably, to bring said shady trader to book. What we get is what I might call the “misadventures of Samuel”, a story of a once-innocent academic fallen among knaves. There are sex scenes so bad that I fear for Martin Baker’s reputation. And they add nothing to the plot. There is a feeling that we need a least a bit of sex in there to clinch a movie deal for the novel. Much of the dialogue between the main characters is clunky and lacks believability. I have worked in finance and the media and can state without qualification that yes, there are some nasty pieces of work in both, but they do not talk as Martin Baker has them talking, at least not all the time.
Also, the plot does not make a lot of sense, and the central premise: that a single proprietary desk dealer and a few buddies can bring down not just a couple of other banks, but wipe out parts of the global economy, simply does not stand up to scrutiny, although it plays to the notion that bankers are “Masters of the Universe” with deep and dark powers. Of course, there can be spectacular blowups and we are witnessing some of that now, as the recent cases of Northern Rock and Bear Stearns prove, and as Barings and Long Term Capital Management did before it. But the idea that one private bank can cause a major recession seems over the top; to do that, they need the assistance, however unintended, of governments and central banks. For sure, in a thriller, a bit of licence is okay, but you need enough believability to carry the reader along. I do not think Mr Baker quite pulls this off.
Perhaps my biggest disappointment is not the credibility of the plot, but that the character of Spendlove is not quite convincing: he seems too gullible. I never quite believe that such a smart guy could let his media puppetmasters treat him like so badly. We never really find out what motivated his media controllers to act as they did. If I were Spendlove, I’d tell his bosses to get lost and go back to doing something more intelligent instead. He lacks depth; we do not really get to grips with what makes him tick as a character beyond a desire to get some excitement away from the academic world and earn pots of money.
There are good things about the novel, to be fair. Mr Baker knows how finance works or at least he knows about the jargon used around it; he has a good feel for what a dealing room looks like, how people in these places act and he sometimes gets the dialogue right. As a journalist, he has an excellent understanding of how markets move on rumours, how news services like Reuters or Dow Jones cover the news and how bankers’ hours get elongated by time-zones. Some of the touches are a bit cliched, but the cliches do not grate too much.
Generally speaking, however, I rate this book as a two out of five, with five as the top score and one as poor. There is a great, contemporary novel to be written that has the doings of financiers at its core and which does not pander to the notion that moneymaking is a zero-sum game. Mr Baker does at least understand, to his credit, that there is a yawning gap in the arts world’s treatment of finance. It is a bit of a shame that he has not really filled it. Maybe the next one will be better.
Not to go OT too soon, but another genre that’s shamefully neglected is the exciting and dramatic world of IT.
Oh, I know that there have been books, movies and TV shows about whiz kid hackers, but I’m talking about the mature IT professional who keeps the wheels of corporate IT turning, while having numerous adventures and lots of incredible sex with outrageously attractive women in romantic locations around the world and simultaneously battling evil and saving the world.
I’ve offered to provide details of the kind of things I’m talking about; I’ve even offered to star in the movie version, but sadly I’ve so far had no offers.
There was the John D. MacDonald thriller Pale Gray for Guilt that I remember liking very much.
John D. MacDonald wrote a financial thriller, Pale Gray for Guilt, I remember liking very much.
For sure, Monica. Remember John D. MacDonald’s sidekick, Meyer, was some kind of a financial something. Economist?
From WSJ Online:
Er, Travis McGee’s sidekick.
I stopped reading your review when you said the main character’s name is Samuel Spendlove. That name alone pretty much told me all I need to know about the book.
I recommend Mark Helprin’s “Memoir from Antproof Case.”
I’ll take exception to that, Andy! That was my mother’s maiden name (no, not Samuel).
However, the thought that parents could impose such an agonizingly alliterative monicker to their offspring is pretty scary.
Michael Ridpath has done quite well out of the genre. Met him. Nice young man. But never read him. Don’t really like thrillers of any kind.
How about The Crash of ’79 by Paul E. Erdman?
Allow me to recommend Manuel Vazquez Montalban, The Angst-Ridden Executive (1977), which is set in the murky world of high finance – and indeed any of Montalban’s stories about his marvellous creation, Pepe Carvalho, which – as well as being superb detective fiction – are also paeans to everything that is wonderful about Barcelona, namely food, women and football.
In the ’80 Paul Erdman wrote a whole bunch of book based in/on Finance including the Crash of ’79 and the Zero Coupon. They are almost charmingly retro in style but at least financially litterate.
There is a great, contemporary novel to be written that has the doings of financiers at its core and which does not pander to the notion that moneymaking is a zero-sum game.
Sorry, I don’t believe this is true. “Deals” will, because of the financing, allow entrepreneurs to create wealth (positive sum). But the deal itself is pretty much zero-sum: the higher the interest rate the more the bank gets, the less the payer has.
Also, in bidding for a deal — the more the investment bank gets in fees, the less that is available for the investment.
It’s actually a hugely underdiscussed issue in economics, that each individual deal, each decision, IS a zero-sum distribution of “deal surplus”. The wealth creation effect is based on this deal surplus.
Example, 2-week holiday at an Italian beach for a family of 6.
Offers: 1200 for 2 rooms 100 m away; 1000 for 2 rooms 350 m away, 1100 for 1 room 50 m away.
I’m willing to pay 1300 for 2 rooms 50 m away. All of these are acceptable, and I’ll choose one (a, probably), and have some surplus — but obviously, the more they get the more I have to pay. Zero sum in distributing the particular deal surplus.
Every individual deal includes a surplus to both sides — this win-win aspect is the basis of Free Trade. But the distribution of the surplus isn’t.
I think this is such an important point, I’m going to have to think about it some more.
Tom Grey, you are going to have to think about this some more because when you do, you will see that your argument is a nonsense. If I trade with you and we both get something that we want, that is a positive sum game. There is no “surplus” that exists “out there” in some pre-existing state outside the properties of the individuals concerned.
“Other People’s Money”
Goe, pointing out an oversight.
If you enjoy “financial thrillers” you might want to check out “Nineteenth Street NW” by Brett Wood (it’s coming out Sept 2008, but review copies are available, or pre-order from Amazon). It’s about a terrorist trying to sabotage the world currency markets (which trade more than a trillion dollars per day) and it’s set in an IMF-like organization called the International Monetary and Financial Organization (which is how central banks etc are brought into the picture). It is more of a character-based thriller, with two strong female protagonists. Check it out. the book’s website is http://www.imfo.org