Thursday, March 31, 2011
A Week in December for a Week in March
...this was not a retail park with trees and benches, but a compression of trade in a city centre, in which migrant labour was paid by foreign capital to squeeze out layers of profit from any Londoner with credit. A their new ‘Emirates’ Stadium, meanwhile, named for an Arab airline, Arsenal of North London were kicking off under floodlights against Chelsea from the West, while the goalkeepers – one Czech, one Spanish – jumped up and down and beat their ribs to keep warm. At nearby Upton Park, the supporters were leaving the ground after a home defeat; and only a few streets from the Boleyn Ground, with its East End mixture of sentimentality and grievance, a solitary woman paid her respects to a grandfather – come from Lithuania some eighty years ago – as she stood by his grave in the overflowing cemetery of the East Ham Synagogue. Up the road in Victoria Park, the last of the dog-walkers dragged their mongrels back to flats in Hackney and Bow, grey high-rises marked with satellite dishes, like ears cupped to the outside world in the hope of gossip or escape...
So opens Sebastian Faulk’s A Week in December (2009, Hutchinson) with a brilliant description of contemporary London.
On my trip down to London (see the previous post), I was able to finish reading Sebastian Faulks’ recent novel A Week in December. It was an appropriate read as it’s a novel of modern London, following the lives of seven characters whose stories overlap over the course of a week (similar to the “network” or “multi-protagonist” narrative device used in films like Babel and Syriana). Faulks picks an interesting cross-section of British society: a superrich hedge fund manager and his overlooked family, tube driver who cares for her ill brother, would-be terrorist whose immigrant parents look forward to receiving an OBE as the highest honour, disgruntled failed novelist turned book reviewer, newly signed star Polish footballer, to name a few. It’s a book worth reading. A Week in December gives a snapshot of contemporary British society, thoroughly satirised.
I did have a few frustrations with the book; the detailed account of dodgy financial dealings distracted from the narrative flow. Faulk’s research in this area is impressive and gives a disturbing picture of high-level banking: the hedge fund manager carefully engineers the financial collapse of a struggling bank, knowing this will result in the loss of thousands of jobs as well as crippling the trade of African cocoa (knowing this will cause many to literally starve to death), all at the altar of personal finical profit. It’s a disturbing scenario due to its believability, but remains bogged down by technical detail. Or perhaps I am missing something and this was exactly the point Faulks was trying to make – that what is described in dispassionate terms of profit can hide a sinister reality? Does Faulks intend to draw a parallel with the insidious financial dealings and the terrorist bomb plot on a major hospital – both planned with a cool logic unfettered by tragic consequence? While such questions are interesting on an intellectual level, more time could have been devoted to the set of characters where the reader’s empathy is engaged, as this is where Faulks’ writing is at its strongest.
This gripe aside, A Week in December remains an engaging novel that raises interesting questions about our hyper-connected world. Many of the characters live in virtual realties – be that online games, the financial excesses of Premiership football, party-political manoeuvring, reality TV, living in memories of a past life – to the detriment of genuine human contact in the here-and-now. There is a palpable longing for genuine relationship and love, as one character muses about contemporary living, “It’s very difficult in life to know what’s valuable, what’s lasting. Even to know what’s real.” A disillusioned student attempts to find this trough faith, whose genuine desire to make a difference about injustice in the world precipitates a slow slide toward militant Islamism. Faulks’ captures his internal dilemma as, “He logically believed he spiritually believed, and he had a young man’s thirst for action; on the other hand, he was a Kilmarnock supporter.” Interestingly, the author puts this into stark contrast with the student’s parents, who see their Muslim faith as condemning violence and compels them to be good neighbours.
Faulks’ conclusions are ultimately (and a bit disappointingly) humanistic, but clearly captures the human longing for genuine relationship, beauty, and justice. The novel touches the pulse of conemporary London, and probably urban Britain more generally. As an aside, I found it interesting that the longings described in A Week in December find some traction with Tom Wright’s observations in Simply Christian:
God is the creator and lover of the world. Jesus spoke of God as 'the Father who sent me', indicating that, as he says elsewhere, 'anyone who has seen me has seen the Father'. Look hard at Jesus, especially as he goes to his death, and you will discover more about God than you could ever have guessed from studying the infinite shining heavens or the moral law within your own conscience. God is the one who satisfies the passion for justice, the longing for spirituality, the hunger for relationships, the yearning for beauty. And then re-read the Farewell Discourses in John, and discover that, by the Spirit, those who follow Jesus are to become part of that same life.
A novel worth checking out, especially if you need something to read while travelling to London.
