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Hector Chetwode-Talbot, Eck to his friends, has left the army after a rather nasty moment in Colombia. From a privileged background, he is slightly at a loss as to what to do next, when he is approached by an old army pal, Bilbo Mountwilliam. Bilbo runs an investment fund company and business is booming. Bilbo persuades Eck to join the company as a 'greeter', for a person with Eck's list of contacts is an easy route to a rich seam of moneyed clients. All Eck has to do is supply the contacts with entertainment and large G&Ts and then the fund managers will do the rest. Soon Eck is able to buy himself a luxury sports car and decadent flat in the city. All that is missing in his life is a woman. It is on a golfing trip to France with his friend Henry Newark that Eck first meets Charlie Summers, a fly-by-night entrepreneur who is hiding out in France after a 'misunderstanding with Her Majesty's Customs and Revenue'. Charlie's latest scheme is to import Japanese dog food into the UK. Henry casually mentions that Charlie should 'look us up' if he is ever in Gloucestershire. Not only does Charlie Summers look Henry up, he arrives with his suitcase, intent on staying with the Newarks and relaunching his dog food business in their area. But with the financial crash looming, Eck begins to ask himself if they are so very different...… (more)
User reviews
How about this for a neat summary of how we got in to the state in which we now find ourselves:
"We had behaved as though risk had been banished; but, like some awful monster crouching in the shadows beneath the stairs, it turned out to have been there all the time."
There's a longer, and even better comment along these lines in the Epilogue, talking about how "the music that the rest of us had been dancing to for the last few decades really had stopped, at least for the time being."
I could imagine some readers might have a problem with Torday's unusual mixture of humour, romance and topicality, but it is a mixture that appeals to me. He is very good at examining the predicament of a certain kind of weak and lost middle aged male character. The part played by hunting, fishing and country houses in his novels, combined with their wit, are suggestive to me of a Wodehouse for the twenty first century.
This book also has one of the best endings, or certainly the most poignant, I've read in months.
Torday brings the light
All goes well for two or three years and Eck finds his own fortunes waxing along with those of his firm. He decides to go for a golfing holiday in France with Lord Henry Newark, an old schoolfriend who might just be looking for the sort of investment opportunity that Mountwilliam and Partners might be able to offer.. While discussing some of the preliminaries over a couple of drinks in a village square they are accosted by Charlie Summers, a dissolute and downbeat English ex-pat who asks them for a light and joins in their conversation. This chance meeting will have significant repercussions throughout the rest of the novel.
The humour is dry and understated but very telling, and Torday's simple portrayal of the unfettered risks that such investment schemes offered makes one wonder how anyone, let alone the so-called experts, could ever have failed to see the inevitable consequences..
All in all it was very entertaining, despite the gravity of the basic subject matter.
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| 823.92 |