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: