BOOK
A Week In December
by Sebastian Faulks
Hutchinson, £12.99
4/5
IN A NUTSHELL
In an authoritative and biting state of the nation novel, the author aims to capture turbulent times through the eyes of seven characters that typify the times, including a Muslim extremist, a hedge fund manager and a Premiership footballer.
REVIEW
With this commanding state-of-the-nation book with rotten finance at its core, Sebastian Faulks looks to emulate Tom Wolfe without the literary tics.
He takes seven days in the life of the capital in December 2007 and he takes seven characters. He walks in their shoes awhile and watches where their paths cross and, tellingly, where they find no common ground.
Faulks' journalistic background is wonderfully in evidence here, as he negotiates the complex patterns of London, probing a myriad sub-cultures and illuminating strangers with delightful detail. He picks upon the scourges of our age - a hedge fund manager, a druggie, a suicide bomber, a Premiership footballer - and uses their lives to paint a grander picture of end-of-empire indulgence.
Although he is dryly efficient in his prose Faulks rouses himself to glorious indignation to unleash a bitterly comic satire, savaging contemporary betes noires like education, reality TV and the internet. Yet amid his wicked comedy, he still finds the warmth in the heart of even the most deluded and venal of his septet.
Faulks dances across the big themes of the day with such thoroughness there is little doubt this will become required reading when future generations come to wonder where it all went very wrong.
