An improbable farce, too clever by half

The Mark and the Void

by Paul Murray

(Hamish Hamilton, £18)

Anna Farmar

Foul-mouthed, occasionally funny and way too long, Paul Murray’s third novel The Mark and the Void is set in Dublin at the height of the boom.

An improbably naïve Frenchman, Claude, the hapless narrator, is a junior analyst in a merchant bank in the Irish Financial Services Centre. Lonely and nerdy, he allows himself to be convinced by a down-at-heel novelist called Paul that he is a suitable subject for a book. 

But first Paul has to learn about the workings of the money markets, so the bank’s bosses are persuaded to allow him to shadow Claude during his working day. 

This improbable scenario is spun out over 459 readable pages with episodes of high farce interspersed with Claude’s earnest reflections on his life and the chaos he sees all around him. He tries to explain high finance to Paul, but the not very bright writer fails to grasp the nature of money.

We are treated to encounters with Claude’s colleagues and acquaintances – the uptight German, the lewd Londoners, the Eastern European pole dancer with two degrees, the mad mathematician imported from Russia – stereotypes all. 

The plot involves mysterious paintings, another mad Russian, a poet this time, the looming financial collapse and Claude’s decision to help his struggling friends with other people’s money.

Along the way we also meet a hatchet-faced literary critic (female), a beautiful waitress and a minister for finance who eats garlic and is dying of cancer with all the sad signs and symptoms which that entails. 

This is crass: perhaps the British publisher did not realise that a real person was being caricatured here.

There are a few good jokes, though. Paul explains to Claude that it is a trade secret that writers help each other:

“Tolstoy got stuck when he was writing War and Peace so he got in touch with Winston Churchill.” 

“Winston Churchill co-wrote War and Peace?”

“Just little bits here and there. Details.” 

Perhaps the author should stick to the comedy: the book reads as if he couldn’t quite make up his mind what he was writing: a post-post-modern take on the futility of writing fiction in the 21st Century, a biting satire, a meditation on the nature of reality in a world where money can be conjured out of thin air – or a knockabout farce.

Fittingly enough, like so many of the transactions that helped to cause the recent recession, it is all a bit too clever by half, adding up to far less than the sum of its parts.