| Illustration by Stephan Schmitz |
‘The Mark and the Void,’ by Paul Murray
December 10, 2015
Paul Murray’s satirical novel of the Irish banking crisis, “The Mark and the Void,” takes place primarily at the International Financial Services Center, a section of Dublin that functions as a tax haven for multinational corporations, a place where billions in assets hide behind brass nameplates in the Transaction House and shadow banks operate hidden from the prying eyes of regulators. It’s anonymous by design. As one of Murray’s characters explains: “We’re in the middle of Dublin, where Joyce set ‘Ulysses.’ But it doesn’t look like Dublin. We could be in London or Frankfurt or Kuala Lumpur.”