A Week in December
Sebastian Faulks
Book notes
If Charles Dickens were alive today, this is the kind of book he’d be writing. It’s a panoramic novel which paints a vivid portrait of Britain on the edge through a diverse cast of characters whose lives interconnect during the week leading up to Christmas, 2007. They include an unscrupulous hedge-fund boss whose latest money-making scheme is designed to bring down a bank while netting him billions; his indulged teenage, drug-taking son; an ambitious MP and his social-climbing wife; an Asian immigrant food entrepreneur about to receive an OBE after making large party political donations; his student son, part of a British Islamic terrorist cell planning to bomb London; and a Polish footballer newly-signed to a Premier League club, partnered by a suitably glamorous Russian WAG. Sound familiar? Author Sebastian Faulks has created a rich and compelling picture from the news which has dominated our lives over the past few years – and fairly unsettling it is, full of greed, alienation, self-interest and moral decline. But, as with Dickens, all is not doom and gloom. The book is full of wicked humour, and an unlikely love affair blossoms amid the decadence. As the page-turning story barrels towards its climax, lessons are learned which provide hope for the future.
About the author
Sebastian Faulks was born in a village near Newbury, Berkshire, in 1953 and decided on his future career while still at school. ‘From the age of about 14, I had made up my mind. I was inspired by Dickens and D H Lawrence among others. I set my heart on being a novelist at that young age.’ But it wasn’t until 1984 that his first novel, A Trick of the Light, was published. After reading English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, he spent some time teaching at a private school before becoming a journalist, working as a feature writer for Sunday Telegraph, literary editor at The Independent, and deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday, leaving in 1991. His second novel, The Girl at the Lion d’Or, was published in 1989, the first of a ‘French trilogy’ completed by Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He has also written a James Bond novel, Devil May Care. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. The Tavistock Clinic in association with the University of East London awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the understanding of psychiatry in his 2005 novel Human Traces. Sebastian Faulks is married with three children and lives in London.
Click here to view great offers on other Sebastian Faulks novels.
Discussion points
1. The book paints a fairly jaundiced picture of Britain. Is it one you recognise?
2. Gabriel wonders when money became ‘the only thing that mattered’. Is he right?
3. Many of the characters escape from everyday life into some kind of virtual existence. What effect is this having on human relationships?
4. Which characters can you sympathise with?
5. Do any discover things about themselves which will change their lives for the better?
6. Do you think the intricacies of the financial world are easy to follow?
7. The literary critic Ralph Tranter is overjoyed at the prospect of earning £45,000 a year. Hedge fund boss John Veals will never be satisfied, however many billions he makes. What does this say about money?
8. Is Hassan’s change of heart convincing?
9. Will the novel still be as relevant once the current economic crisis is over?
10. What hope does the book offer for the future?
Author's view
For a long time I had been aware of people in finance who swanked about giving themselves airs, pretending what they did was important or worthwhile, when I knew for a fact it was useless. They don’t invest and they don’t bank. They gamble. They gamble giant sums on the outcome of bets on the likelihood of other bets’ defaulting. If they win, they keep millions per man with minimal tax; if they lose, the ‘little people’ – that’s you and me -- must cover all their losses. This is not good. What is especially not good about it is the way these men (mostly men) persuaded Messrs Blair and Brown that they were admirable, respectable and deserving of special treatment. We expect our bouncers, touts and pimps to be crooks – but not those who have the ear of the prime minister.
John Veals, the central character in this novel, is a hedge fund manager whose every waking thought is about making more money. He has no ethics because he does not understand what ethics are; and if he did, he could not be successful in his world. He is a ‘one-dimensional’ character, in that he thinks of only one thing. Yet his personal narrowness has wide consequences – primarily for his wife and children, but latterly for the whole of the society he infests.
A Week in December takes a cross-section of that society, and finds that each of the main characters, while apparently quite different from one another, has something in common. Jenni drives a London Tube train. She deals with engineering, people, rails and solid earth; but at night she escapes to an alternative reality on her computer. Hassan is a student at a modest South London college, but in his mind he is inflamed by voices reportedly heard by a solitary man on a sandy peninsula in the first century AD – and by the literal truth of what these voices said. Gabriel is a lawyer in a real world of colleagues and papers and office routine; but his attention all the time is with a woman who invaded his life, took his heart and made off with it.
I had never set a book in the present day before and was not prepared for the tittle-tattle that greeted it as journalists speculated which character was ‘based on’ which real person. None. I know one hedge fund manager, but he is the opposite of Veals in all respects: a model of enlightened philanthropy. I know many lawyers, but none like Gabriel. I also know a lot of teenagers, though none so hopelessly adrift on skunk and virtual reality as poor John Veals’s son, Finbar. Perhaps the key character in the book, the one who unites the themes, the one who hears all the voices of virtual realities, is Gabriel’s schizophrenic brother, Adam. Humankind, as a line of T.S.Eliot has it, cannot bear much reality. And if this sounds a bit grim - and it periodically is - there is always the absurd journalist R.Tranter, who lives only for your amusement.
I wanted to write a novel that was a homage to my hero Dickens, and there are various nods to his London books (Tranter and Knocker echo Wegg and Boffin in Our Mutual Friend, for instance). I also thought it was time I set a book in the present day, and I admit this was not as easy as it looked. The present is such thin stuff; it has no depth, at least not in this country, where we have no laureates of the everyday - no Updike, Bellow or Roth to make the modern and mundane look luminous. Then I saw that the problem was also the solution: and the theme of the book is really that very thinness – the way that life today drives people to seek comfort in other realities, most of them dangerous.
I planned an 800-pager, à la Dickens, but was overtaken by the credit crisis of 2008 and decided to start again, locating the book at the last moment in time (December, 2007) that it was still possible to believe that the boom was never-ending. I also decided to reduce the timespan of the story to a week, to add urgency. This worked well for the speed of the story, but gave me problems with the relationships, which don’t take place over six days. How I solved it all and allocated equal space to all the main characters, you don’t need to know; enough to say it was like doing a Rubik cube in each hand, blindfold. But none of that toil should be apparent to you, dear reader: I laboured so that you need not. This is a much angrier book than I first imagined, but it also has, I hope, much humour, some love and, in the end, a hope of redemption.