Book review: The Mark and the Void

READERS may well have found the novel that captures the spirit of Ireland’s post-Celtic Tiger recession in Paul Murray’s The Mark and the Void, set in Dublin two years after “the collapse of Lehman Brothers finally ignited the bonfire that was the Irish economy”.

Paul Murray

Hamish Hamilton, €13.99; ebook, €8.49

The story at the heart of The Mark and the Void unfolds like the script of a Charlie Kaufman movie. Claude Martingale is a research analyst for an investment bank in Dublin’s financial services quarter, a French immigrant who spends 16-hour days “in the service of money”, with zilch going on in his social life until a mysterious writer, Paul, enters his world with a fabulous plan to make him the protagonist of his novel. Paul wants to play James Joyce to Claude’s Leopold Bloom, to get the jenny on what it’s like to be a modern, faceless man.

Madcap adventures ensue, including bank heists, a potential love affair with the Greek waitress struggling to make her mark as an abstract painter in the cafe Claude frequents, and walk-on parts for several thinly veiled characters from Ireland’s ruling class.

They include “a raw garlic-eating Minister for Finance”, a billionaire construction company head risen from the bog, and the sexist chief executive of Claude’s bank who’s known for his low golf handicap, gnomic “inspirational memos”, and for telling a reporter that “women on top [was his] least favourite position”.

Most colourful of all of Murray’s supporting cast is Miles O’Connor, the chummy boss of Royal Irish Bank, once hailed as “the best bank in the world” but now going from one government-sponsored recapitalisation fix to another.

When Claude gets a five-minute audience with him in the bar of the Shelbourne Hotel after a Royal AGM, he’s urged to take a chance on the future over the past: “Things have changed, Claude.

There’s a whole new way of doing things. Switch on the telly, you’ve got ordinary people being turned into superstars overnight. We’re doing the same thing for Ireland. We are turning this place into a modern fucking country.

That’s what these guys, these young developers, are doing here. They’re not dragging the fucking past around after them like some mouldy old fucking blanket they had as a bloody kid. They’re chucking it in a skip and starting from scratch.” Then he pauses, laughs to himself, and adds: “Or that’s the sales pitch anyway.”

Murray is masterful at capturing the cynicism of the banking world, the way its staffers, who keep landlines “for when I need to find my mobile”, indulge in vacuous bar-room chat like debates on “whether a boom or a bust is a better time to be rich”.

His prose is peppered with enlightened digressions on art, anthropology, geo-metry, philosophy and the origins of the corporation in Europe’s Middle Ages.

There are moments while reading The Mark and the Void that are almost dizzying, as Murray careers down the side-street of another subplot. In the hands of a novelist with a heavier touch, they could be confounding, but not in Murray’s. He’s written a notable satirical novel.

Few can nail the mystifying ways of the Irish as precisely: “with their demon priests, their cellulite… their foreign football teams, betting slips… colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, stoical laughter, wavering camaraderie… their building-site countryside… their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punch-bag history, their bankrupt state, and their inveterate difference.”