Paperback by Hamish Hamilton, £12.99 (ebook £6.02)
Murray’s follow-up to the acclaimed Skippy Dies is set amid the
detritus of the Irish financial crash he predicted in his 2003 debut,
An Evening of Long Goodbyes.
Working in one of the investment banks insulated from the savage austerity they caused, narrator Claude meets an author (called, inevitably, Paul) researching a book set in a bank… and so begins a yarn which teeters from farce to unflinching bleakness.
Its big problem is that the banks are already too grotesquely absurd to satirise, too horrifically real to amuse. But they’re surely a necessary topic to address, and Murray’s verve and invention mostly carry him through.
He expands his canvas to address art, mortality, the dissociation of modern life, with the ambition of Jonathan Franzen meeting the metafictional wit of Flann O’Brien; there’s also an element of heist-meets-farce recalling the best of Michael Frayn. A bold, flawed, magnificent mess of a book.
