Shoppy People

In March of the year he set out in search of the mythical northern polar sea, young Captain Robert Walton — whose letters open Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein — seemed to have it all. He wrote of the vessel he’d procured, a crew of ‘dauntless courage,’ and enough supplies to carry them northwards beyond the Archangel ice. There was, however, something missing. A friend. ‘I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.’

Walton, of course, finds one in the end: a benighted scientist on the edge of death, all too eager to tell his sorry tale. After hearing him out, the young captain wisely turns the ship around and heads back to England as fast as possible. The Walton–Frankenstein partnership thus, I think, has to join Melmotte–Fisker and Scrooge–Marley as yet another of literature’s doomed business partnerships.

Writers, and their creations, have often held a soft spot for technology: from Caleb Garth’s longing to witness ‘the thunder and plash of the engine’, to the charming note in Len Deighton’s Bomber, which thanks Mr Jacques Maisonrouge of IBM for setting him up with a computer and magnetic tape. By most accounts, it was the first novel ever written on a computer.

Even the most resolute of the Romantic poets found themselves charmed. In Don Juan, Byron imagines steam engines carrying men to the moon. Novalis, writing Hymns to the Night while working as a mining engineer in Saxony, praised 'the lovely harmonies of thy skilled handicraft.' When Wordsworth, in 1802, wrote that mankind had nothing to show more fair, he wasn’t gazing at the Lake District, but out over industrial London.

Turning such technologies into viable businesses, however — the things that, as cotton magnate John Thornton puts it in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, sit at the front line of the 'war which compels, and shall compel, all material power to yield to science' — is a task that literature has generally found less interesting.

North and South is the exception that proves the rule: a stout defence of the ‘shoppy people’ of the 1850s who dare stray from the ‘three learned professions’ (then law, medicine, and the clergy; now, I suppose, finance, law, and consulting) to ‘make their fortunes in trade again.’ ‘I’m sure you don’t want me to admire butchers and bakers, and candlestick-makers, do you, Mamma?’ says Margaret Hale at the beginning of the novel. By the end, it turns out, she does, a rare thing in literature indeed.

The horrors of Coketown, or the sadness Silas Marner feels at seeing his Lantern Yard subsumed into a factory, hardly slowed the rate of Victorian industry. Nor did the moralising of Shaw or Priestley put 20th-century Britain off the mass-produced comforts their villains so cheerfully sent rolling off the factory floor. From Robert Peel’s 1846 call to ‘advance, not recede,’ to Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat,’ or even Thatcher’s ‘there is no alternative,’ the roles were clear: politicians made the case for economic progress; writers, the case against it.

That’s no longer true. Western policymakers now focus most of their energies on culture, and how best to shape it. Gnash your teeth about the economy, by all means. But try to tell a new story? No thanks. Hence the paradox we face in Britain and elsewhere: an abundance of policy that sets out a course toward growth, coupled with a sheer lack of political will to enact any of it.

The consequences of that are clear. Split my life in two and you get two sixteen-year periods. In the first, from 1992 to 2008, I lived in a country with just over 2.3% average GDP growth per head. In the second, it was below 0.5%. At some point you feel the difference, no matter how insulated you are.

Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt’s new novel, is a rare and excellent attempt to reignite that lost imagination, a story of two McKinsey consultants who quit their jobs to start an experimental energy company, swapping a life ‘safe and comfortable on the steady flow of fees’ for one of ‘risk, heartbreak, and [the] occasional glory of trade or industry.’ Shoppy people, indeed.

We first meet the protagonists not as co-founders, but as undergraduates. James Drayton is at the Oxford University careers fair, staring down the barrel of corporate law, hunted by a pair of predatory lawyers from Allen & Overy. Roland Mackenzie is having a very different Oxford experience, the highlight of which is a late-night romp with the editor of a student newspaper amid its proof-strewn offices. I particularly enjoyed showing these pages to my wife, a former editor of one such paper, whom I met in my second year. Sadly, I never made it into the OxStu offices.

The genius and the drifter promptly take us on a Gulliver-esque journey through Britain’s recent economic history. We begin with a perfectly drawn stint at McKinsey, featuring trips to the Grand Kitzbühel Hotel and reverent lectures about a man named Marvin Bower, confirmed to me by a friend as ‘McKinsey Jesus.’ A brief turn through Whitehall and a fever-dream sequence in the City of London later, the pair land in Aberdeen, where they’ve been sent to slowly and kindly gut the oil and gas companies of the Scottish east coast.

As you can probably guess, this is not the usual contemporary literary novel. Out are the listless creatives, louche loafers, and literary lads. Drayton, at one point, casually notes he hasn’t read a novel since leaving university. This is the world of the HENRYs: Fitbits, Infernos, and JP Morgan Challenge runs.

All the better for it. No one loves a stroller-clutching Norwegian existentially stomping around one of Stockholm’s shabbier playgrounds more than me, but this is a novel that deals in the working lives of actual Britain: consultants, lawyers, and young professionals. It’s the class that underpins the British economy, yet rarely appears in literary fiction. Or if it does, it appears only as a marker of narrative shame, as corporate lawyers such as poor, harmless Darren, the stray-catching half-brother in Intermezzo, can attest.

Finally, some normal people at last. Or so it seems until Aberdeen breaks them. Driven mad by their roles as McKinsey’s answer to the Duke of Cumberland, they impulsively step off the conveyor and, with the help of Alan, a garden-shed inventor in the best British tradition, start a business designing and building floating tidal energy generators.

At first, their generator is not so different from the others that sit off the brutal Orkney shoreline, bashed and dashed by waves, rocks, and seabed alike. Soon, however, things begin to look a little different. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk pop up in cameos reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher in The Line of Beauty (or, I suppose Napoleon in War and Peace). The rest, as the undoubted fictional biographers appearing just off-screen by the end of the book would say, is history.

This is a much bigger, looser novel than we’re used to in the post-Outline era: books tightly drawn, adjective-averse, and often wrapped up in under 200 pages. Here, the incident that truly sets the plot in motion — their exit from McKinsey — doesn’t arrive until page 193. Many contemporary writers would have dispatched everything before that in a single line. Starritt doesn’t. We get it all.

This sweepiness brings us another gift we’re no longer used to: an array of deeply enjoyable supporting characters. I’ll pick just one. Drayton’s father is a true man of Canonbury: an academic and Italianophile who brings out the pasta machine as they plan the business at the dinner table. Home-made polpettone (alas, a little dry), chestnut-flour gnocchi (‘it’s the wrong time of year really, but nevertheless’), and zucchini-flower ravioli all flow forth from a man who, when watching football, chooses which team to support based on whose home city he prefers. Fantastico.

So far, so Victorian, a mood only heightened by the fact that, as I’ve mentioned, this book comes with something close to a mission: to help us take economic growth seriously again.

Does it succeed? Reader, I think it does.

The first reason is that both Drayton and Mackenzie are far from the characters we might imagine them to be — corporate terminators without a soul, knowing not why the rest of us cry. Part of this comes from each character’s enjoyable idiosyncrasies: Drayton’s way of coping with life by simply learning a lot of facts; or Mackenzie’s constant uncertainty as to whether he is living the right life after all. Some comes from the richness of the book’s corporate detail: the no-no-no-no-yes nature of company building; the crushing defeats behind even the smallest public win; the sting of investor rejection. Often, it’s simply the level of detail we’re treated to from the world both characters are a part of: the arcane names of the girls' schools of London; the litmus test for who in a friendship group would get married first (‘those who’d been together since Oxford, and the Christians’); or the modern-day etiquette of DINK holidays (‘Going to Paris meant they could work online from the train’).

Through these details you feel not only the lives of the characters, but the life of a country. Much of the novel is devoted to the 2008 financial crisis and its centrality to the economy we live with today. Starritt includes a few Don DeLillo-esque vignettes: glimpses into the heads of Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, and Mario Draghi as they try to comprehend the crisis and contain its fallout. If you’ve ever wondered how Bernanke felt, mid-Nespresso, before a 5am conference call in the depths of the collapse, or what passed through Draghi’s mind in the moments before the 'Whatever it takes' speech (‘Fuck Mervyn, that old maid’), then this novel has you covered.

Britain loses its mojo, and with it, its knowledge-worker vanguard (Starritt, I think, would argue we’ve never really got it back). Characters are laid off. The survivors are moved onto restructurings. The mood darkens. The country of New Labour turns back to Le Carré grey: ‘Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away. Bye-bye, world.’

The crisis makes them. Their first real bond forms during a furtive trip to the Lehman Brothers offices on the day it closes. And it’s a journey in a gloriously ridiculous purple Lamborghini — presumably affordable because some poor dealer had just gone under — that seals it.

From it comes a new national mission of their own: to build a great British company. I emphasise the word British for a reason. This is a startup, yes, and even one financed by Americans, but it’s a very British one at that (perhaps even more accurately, a Scottish one). The economic action here takes place not in Palo Alto, or even King’s Cross, but in the bays of Orkney and the warehouses of the Scottish east coast. The final scene takes Anglofuturism to northern Scotland, where an ambitious new breakthrough unfolds — with all 927 metres of Ben Hope presumably looking on.

This, for me, is what makes the story most enjoyable — and what marks it, I think, as the first true Anglofuturist novel. The characters never become Americans in the pursuit of growth, nor ever feel they have to. When faced with Peter Thiel’s pronouncements about the death of tertiary education their response is understated - ‘Do you think unis are stagnant backwaters of received ideas?’ ‘Maybe it’s different in postgrad’. So is the response from an air stewardess as they fly back from a fundraising mission: ‘Rockets? Very cool.’ She seemed genuinely impressed and gave them an extra bag of crisps each.’

In terms of plot, at least, the closest contemporary book I could think of wasn’t a novel, but It Started in the Shed, the self-published memoirs last year of Dave Walls, one of the founders of Accuracy International, the company that invented the modern sniper rifle out of a garage in Portsmouth, and is today one of Britain’s most strategically important defence companies. Here’s Walls on meeting his version of Roland Mackenzie: ‘It was a strange feeling to meet up again eight years later under completely different circumstances, and to enter a friendship that unbeknownst to us at the time, would last for the rest of our lives.’

It was Mallarmé who once defined writing as ‘gestures of the idea.’ More recently, those gestures have mostly turned toward culture — but it’s the economic ideas we’re missing. As Starritt demonstrates, we are neither a sordid little country built on OnlyFans, online gambling, and illegal Deliveroo accounts, nor a natural nation of Silicon Valley risk-takers just waiting for a political exhortation to enter our final form.

We’re something different, yet in a way we are yet to fully express. Much of the energies so far in filling that gap have come from the usual suspects: columnists; non-fiction writers; and a new generation of tech-adjacent campaigners. Most would think the novel unsuited to that task.

Yet as Mrs Gaskell, and now Mr Starritt, show us: why not?

aled@ashore.io