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The Mark and the Void
Claude is a Frenchman who lives in Dublin. His birthplace is famed as the city of lovers, but so far love has always eluded him. Instead his life revolves around the investment bank where he works. And then one day he realizes he is being followed around, by a pale, scrawny man. The man's name is Paul Murray.
Paul claims to want to write a novel about Claude and Claude's heart sings. Finally, a chance to escape the drudgery of his everyday office life, to be involved in writing, in art! But Paul himself seems more interested in where the bank keeps its money than in Claude-and soon Claude realizes that Paul is not all he appears to be ...
Paul claims to want to write a novel about Claude and Claude's heart sings. Finally, a chance to escape the drudgery of his everyday office life, to be involved in writing, in art! But Paul himself seems more interested in where the bank keeps its money than in Claude-and soon Claude realizes that Paul is not all he appears to be ...
461 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2015
About the author
Paul Murray
19 books1,558 followersPaul Murray is an Irish novelist. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin and has written two novels: An Evening of Long Goodbyes (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 2003, and nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award) and Skippy Dies (longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic fiction).
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 356 reviews
August 9, 2016
I just read SIX three star novels in a row and here is NUMBER SEVEN which I am not going to finish because 219 pages of Paul Murray’s extremely mild investment-banker-related humour is enough for me this year. I would like to break the asphyxiating cycle of this middling 3 star morass by rating this one or two but I can’t. It’s not bad, it’s just not what I want. It’s extremely readable but after a while it’s - wait a minute yes – no -yes - the prawn cracker effect again… you eat and eat and you taste nothing, just a plasticky ambience in the mouth area, but you don’t stop eating, no no no, there’s nothing anyone could point out as being in any way unpleasant about prawn crackers, except to say you could be using your teeth for something else.
Now this is the follow up novel to Skippy Dies , which got a massive FIVE stars from me. I loved that one to death. Mr Murray got several character voices, all teenagers, so exactly right in that novel and so exactly funny that it’s distressing to find the colour and energy of Skippy substituted for a deliberately flattened first person narrative from a total office high level drone type who works in the type of bank no normal people understand. Our hero Claude is a nerdy introvert who is French and living in Dublin, cue many remarks about how French guys are elegant and sexy and have five girlfriends minimum on the go at the same time, but poor Claude has nobody, just an empty apartment and a distant lust for an abstract painter waitress called Ariadne from Greece.
This all could be a BBC Radio 4 comedy, the sort they put on at 11.30 in the morning, and that is not a good thing to be compared to.
So, pleasant sideswipes at greedy banker types, moderately critical barbs about the plagues of high capitalism, a set of slightly stereotyped office pals for Claude (the Aussie woman, the German guy with his stilted English, the barely sane traders) – oh and we also have East European lap dancers – and we have this groanworthy plot where Claude is approached by an author doing research for a novel on boring banker people and this author’s name is…Paul. His last name is not given up to p220 but I’m guessing it’s Murray.
WHAT THE BLURBS SAY ......... WHAT I SAY
Unputdownable ................. Putdownable
Hilarious and profound ................ I could feel myself not quite smiling
Blade-sharp satire on the banking system ....... You didn’t see The Big Short then?
This was Wings after the Beatles, Bananarama after the Supremes, Goat’s Head Soup after Exile on Main Street, Godfather III after Godfather II, Yeltsin after Gorbachev, Garth Brooks after Hank Williams, The Two Noble Kinsmen after The Tempest, Smiley Smile after Pet Sounds.
Okay, a little harsh, but you get my drift.
Now this is the follow up novel to Skippy Dies , which got a massive FIVE stars from me. I loved that one to death. Mr Murray got several character voices, all teenagers, so exactly right in that novel and so exactly funny that it’s distressing to find the colour and energy of Skippy substituted for a deliberately flattened first person narrative from a total office high level drone type who works in the type of bank no normal people understand. Our hero Claude is a nerdy introvert who is French and living in Dublin, cue many remarks about how French guys are elegant and sexy and have five girlfriends minimum on the go at the same time, but poor Claude has nobody, just an empty apartment and a distant lust for an abstract painter waitress called Ariadne from Greece.
This all could be a BBC Radio 4 comedy, the sort they put on at 11.30 in the morning, and that is not a good thing to be compared to.
So, pleasant sideswipes at greedy banker types, moderately critical barbs about the plagues of high capitalism, a set of slightly stereotyped office pals for Claude (the Aussie woman, the German guy with his stilted English, the barely sane traders) – oh and we also have East European lap dancers – and we have this groanworthy plot where Claude is approached by an author doing research for a novel on boring banker people and this author’s name is…Paul. His last name is not given up to p220 but I’m guessing it’s Murray.
WHAT THE BLURBS SAY ......... WHAT I SAY
Unputdownable ................. Putdownable
Hilarious and profound ................ I could feel myself not quite smiling
Blade-sharp satire on the banking system ....... You didn’t see The Big Short then?
This was Wings after the Beatles, Bananarama after the Supremes, Goat’s Head Soup after Exile on Main Street, Godfather III after Godfather II, Yeltsin after Gorbachev, Garth Brooks after Hank Williams, The Two Noble Kinsmen after The Tempest, Smiley Smile after Pet Sounds.
Okay, a little harsh, but you get my drift.
November 20, 2015
When the ship goes down, I want to be in Murray’s skiff. At least there will be laughter, love, generosity, poetry, and with any luck, a gulp of whiskey among us. If you thought the financial meltdown and its aftermath was too complicated to understand, read Murray. His account is a little like that fabled whiskey, warming and clear. At the inevitable end, we wonder where our head was, to think we could carry on like that and not have a hangover.
Even financial disasters wholly created by the banks could be capitalized upon for their benefit. Murray gives us the example of a small island, Kokomoko, experiencing climate-related tide incursions, transformed to a golf course by a hedge fund. “I’m talking about monetizing failure”:
But this insistence that we think comes to us with many examples of the fun part of thinking: madcap imaginings of a literary dinner, complete with a novelist camping up his meeting with his editor who, in his quest to sign the “next big thing,” appears strangely blinkered to the outrageous behaviors and opinions in his stable of authors. The reviewer who panned him (“I’m a little surprised she has flesh. I always pictured her as a sort of floating skull”) appears oblivious to the careers she has skewered. A slip of an editorial assistant captures everyone’s attention with her tremulous defense of art.
Murray invites us to look at the lives of writers: the crazy cash-flow between a novel’s conception and publication, the procrastination, the wacky attempts to jump start the creative process, the whoring (literally, in this case) of life partners, the desperation and despair. And then the reviews: “TL, DR” (Too Long, Didn’t Read), or the cavalier online dismissal of the years of effort because “Wombat Willy” received the book late and got a papercut getting the book out of the box.
Why bother with art at all? Because it reminds us who and what we are, Murray responds. The painting central to the novel could be seen as a type of graffiti whose price has risen, parallel to banks’ mystical valuations, to unheard-of heights. Threaded throughout the novel are constant references to Joyce and then suddenly, there it is, Ullysses II, the Irish folk in all their beautiful blemish:
This is the first book I have read of Paul Murray’s since Skippy Dies, his magnificent second novel about the horrors of Irish Catholic public schools, and just about everything else, including quantum physics, climate change, history, and music. I found myself relaxing into this new novel, enjoying the ride while harboring a nagging feeling that this is not Murray’s finest work. His talent, understanding, and deep sense of the absurd are undeniable. If I wish for more discipline, focus, and seriousness, will I have to give up the sheer joy of the unwieldy construction? Writers are who they are and do what they will do and thank goodness for it. I note, however, that Murray was hoping to write a short novel this time, which would imply his interest in a greater adherence to those other qualities of style. Perhaps we will get it one day. Murray has the goods, and lord knows I wouldn’t trade one of his laughs for its reverse, not in this world. Joy.
"[The restaurant called] Life is so loud, it takes a few moments to realize it is almost empty."Murray gives his reading audience almost everything we want in a modern novel: a little mystery, a little romance, a little grand larceny. He does not neglect important, relevant subjects like the isolation of lives wrapped in technological bubblewrap or the failure of the banking system to protect and build a middle class. His bright gaze reveals the cracks in individual and institutional facades. But it is all done with a lightness of touch that makes it clear we can understand this, that we must, in fact, understand this, if we are going to save ourselves.
"If it’s a choice between a difficult truth and a simple lie, people will take the lie every time. Even if it kills them."A successful French banker, Claude Martingale, takes a job in Dublin to escape snorts of derision from his father over his choice of career. A blacksmith and former radical, his father was unreasonably proud when his son graduated college with a degree in philosophy. “Philosophy was France’s greatest export,” he would boast to neighbors. How then could his son side with the thieves and quants who knew only how to cut experience into saleable lots, “using the underlying only for what can be derived from it,” rather than understanding the real value of life, of experience itself?
"Technology allows unprecedented quantities of reality to be turned into story. Reality becomes secondary…life becomes raw material for our own narratives."Claude’s investment bank in Dublin creates financial instruments that fictionalize reality. What better place to set a novel? The problem of trying to make interesting the life of a banker was the central struggle of this work, and the central lesson we are meant to take away. Claude’s life in the bank was soulless, but not without moments of excruciating drama. And there was money…lots and lots of money…for some.
"'What is the most reliable area of growth in the twenty-first century?'
’Inequality,’ I say.
‘Bingo.’ "
Even financial disasters wholly created by the banks could be capitalized upon for their benefit. Murray gives us the example of a small island, Kokomoko, experiencing climate-related tide incursions, transformed to a golf course by a hedge fund. “I’m talking about monetizing failure”:
“Don’t you see the bottom line here? Even when it all goes tits up, you still get paid! Profit is finally liberated from circumstance! It’s the Holy Grail! It’s the singularity!...Seizures in the electricity grid, degradation of ecosystems, the spread of epidemics, the disintegration of the financial system—they’re all part of the same phenomenon. Civilization has become a bubble.”Murray warns us that members of society have a responsibility to call out the farce and refuse to play...or get them to pay. They need us, after all.
But this insistence that we think comes to us with many examples of the fun part of thinking: madcap imaginings of a literary dinner, complete with a novelist camping up his meeting with his editor who, in his quest to sign the “next big thing,” appears strangely blinkered to the outrageous behaviors and opinions in his stable of authors. The reviewer who panned him (“I’m a little surprised she has flesh. I always pictured her as a sort of floating skull”) appears oblivious to the careers she has skewered. A slip of an editorial assistant captures everyone’s attention with her tremulous defense of art.
Murray invites us to look at the lives of writers: the crazy cash-flow between a novel’s conception and publication, the procrastination, the wacky attempts to jump start the creative process, the whoring (literally, in this case) of life partners, the desperation and despair. And then the reviews: “TL, DR” (Too Long, Didn’t Read), or the cavalier online dismissal of the years of effort because “Wombat Willy” received the book late and got a papercut getting the book out of the box.
Why bother with art at all? Because it reminds us who and what we are, Murray responds. The painting central to the novel could be seen as a type of graffiti whose price has risen, parallel to banks’ mystical valuations, to unheard-of heights. Threaded throughout the novel are constant references to Joyce and then suddenly, there it is, Ullysses II, the Irish folk in all their beautiful blemish:
”And here, on the teeming road, are the Irish: blanched, pocked, pitted, sleep-deprived, burnished, beaming, snaggle-toothed, balding, rouged, raddled, beaky, exophthalmic; the Irish, with their demon priests, their cellulite, their bus queues and beer bellies, their foreign football teams, betting slips, smart-phones and online deals, their dyed hair, white jeans, colossal mortgages, miraculous medals, ill-fitting suits, enormous televisions, stoical laughter, wavering camaraderie, their flinty austerity and seeping corruption, their narrow minds and broad hearts, their drunken speeches, drunken fights, drunken weddings, drunken sex, their books, saints, tickets to Australia, their building-site countryside, their radioactive sea, their crisps, bars, Lucozade, their tattoos, their overpriced wine and mediocre restaurants, their dreams, their children, their mistakes, their punchbag history, their bankrupt state and their inveterate indifference. Every face is a compendium of singularities, unadulterated by the smoothing toxins of wealth and privilege; to walk among them is to be plunged into a sea of stories, a human comedy so rich it seems on the point of writing itself…”
This is the first book I have read of Paul Murray’s since Skippy Dies, his magnificent second novel about the horrors of Irish Catholic public schools, and just about everything else, including quantum physics, climate change, history, and music. I found myself relaxing into this new novel, enjoying the ride while harboring a nagging feeling that this is not Murray’s finest work. His talent, understanding, and deep sense of the absurd are undeniable. If I wish for more discipline, focus, and seriousness, will I have to give up the sheer joy of the unwieldy construction? Writers are who they are and do what they will do and thank goodness for it. I note, however, that Murray was hoping to write a short novel this time, which would imply his interest in a greater adherence to those other qualities of style. Perhaps we will get it one day. Murray has the goods, and lord knows I wouldn’t trade one of his laughs for its reverse, not in this world. Joy.
July 20, 2015
This book starts promisingly. An author has apparently identified the ideal character for his next novel. Claude is a Frenchman alienated from himself, an outsider working in investment banking in the non-place that is the International Financial Services Centre, a tax haven unceremoniously dumped in the centre of Dublin, peopled by international workers eating things like ‘panini fromage’ and staring at their phones. Paul, the author, tells Claude he wants to write a twenty-first century Ulysses about the non-people in this non-place and Claude is to be his protagonist.
If that was what the book was, it would be a great book. But actually, Paul just wants to get close to Claude so he can figure out how to rob his bank. Only Claude doesn’t get it.
Which might make sense if Claude was self-obsessed, or socially inept. But Claude is neither of those things. In other situations, he shows sensitivity. He is able to judge the mood of a meeting. When he meets a government minister he immediately senses the suffering in the man, and the burden of his responsibilities. He is aware of what his friends are thinking, and of how he disappointed his late father with his choice of career. So when he’s manipulated by Paul, you end up feeling like you’re watching a bad Seventies sitcom where the joke has gone on far longer than is plausible.
In fact, Claude’s voice doesn’t sound like a French investment banker at all, but like an Irish writer, failing to imagine himself into the position of a French banker, which I at first thought was part of the conceit, but now I’m not so sure.
There are some nice observations and some funny set pieces in the book. I did laugh out loud a few times at the insights into the oddness of the characters’ world and the absurdities of the financial markets. But it is very uneven. The office banter feels forced and unconvincing. Claude and his chums talk about where to go for lunch and worry about what to wear on Casual Day, and who to sleep with, and how to furnish their homes. It’s more Marian Keyes than Joyce, but when Keyes does camaraderie the dialogue is sharp and funny and sizzles with subtext. Here it just feels like you really are overhearing bored office workers with nothing to say (or is that part of the conceit too?).
There is, inevitably, a certain amount about politics and investment banking but I’m not sure who will enjoy reading it. If you’ve followed the financial crisis and its aftermath, you’ll probably find Paul’s naïve questions and the characters’ simple answers a little frustrating. Conversely, if you’ve lived through the past seven years and never even felt the urge to look up ‘derivative’ on Wikipedia you’re probably not too interested in learning about it now.
The novel feels like an early draft, before the author has polished the good bits and cut the dull bits. More profoundly, it doesn’t seem quite sure what it wants to be. Is it a heightened, absurdist take on the banking world, peopled by megalomaniacs who are so fixated on making money that they don’t even notice when someone is taking their office apart so they can burgle it right under their noses? Or is it a thoughtful novel about nice people who somehow get mixed up in the murky world of finance and have to fight their way through the contradictions?
For me it doesn’t quite do either.
-
I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley.
If that was what the book was, it would be a great book. But actually, Paul just wants to get close to Claude so he can figure out how to rob his bank. Only Claude doesn’t get it.
Which might make sense if Claude was self-obsessed, or socially inept. But Claude is neither of those things. In other situations, he shows sensitivity. He is able to judge the mood of a meeting. When he meets a government minister he immediately senses the suffering in the man, and the burden of his responsibilities. He is aware of what his friends are thinking, and of how he disappointed his late father with his choice of career. So when he’s manipulated by Paul, you end up feeling like you’re watching a bad Seventies sitcom where the joke has gone on far longer than is plausible.
In fact, Claude’s voice doesn’t sound like a French investment banker at all, but like an Irish writer, failing to imagine himself into the position of a French banker, which I at first thought was part of the conceit, but now I’m not so sure.
There are some nice observations and some funny set pieces in the book. I did laugh out loud a few times at the insights into the oddness of the characters’ world and the absurdities of the financial markets. But it is very uneven. The office banter feels forced and unconvincing. Claude and his chums talk about where to go for lunch and worry about what to wear on Casual Day, and who to sleep with, and how to furnish their homes. It’s more Marian Keyes than Joyce, but when Keyes does camaraderie the dialogue is sharp and funny and sizzles with subtext. Here it just feels like you really are overhearing bored office workers with nothing to say (or is that part of the conceit too?).
There is, inevitably, a certain amount about politics and investment banking but I’m not sure who will enjoy reading it. If you’ve followed the financial crisis and its aftermath, you’ll probably find Paul’s naïve questions and the characters’ simple answers a little frustrating. Conversely, if you’ve lived through the past seven years and never even felt the urge to look up ‘derivative’ on Wikipedia you’re probably not too interested in learning about it now.
The novel feels like an early draft, before the author has polished the good bits and cut the dull bits. More profoundly, it doesn’t seem quite sure what it wants to be. Is it a heightened, absurdist take on the banking world, peopled by megalomaniacs who are so fixated on making money that they don’t even notice when someone is taking their office apart so they can burgle it right under their noses? Or is it a thoughtful novel about nice people who somehow get mixed up in the murky world of finance and have to fight their way through the contradictions?
For me it doesn’t quite do either.
-
I received an ARC from the publisher via Netgalley.
January 2, 2020
[4.5*]
Για μια ακόμα φορά,ο Murray μ'έκανε να γελάσω.Σε ορισμένα σημεία,να δακρύσω από τα γέλια.Και να στενοχωρηθώ (λίγο). Οπότε,πρέπει να έγραψε άλλο ένα πολύ καλό βιβλίο (μετά το "Skippy Dies").
Στο βιβλίο αυτό σατιρίζει την οικονομική κρίση στην Ιρλανδία (αναφέροντας πολλές φορές την Ελλάδα),αλλά και τον σύγχρονο τρόπο ζωής,θα ελεγα.Θίγει και την ανάγκη για ουσιαστική επικοινωνία των ανθρώπων,κάτι που δεν μπορούν να καλύψουν τα σόσιαλ μίντια.Και ο ρόλος της τέχνης παίζει έναν ρόλο σ��ο βιβλίο (και σαν "αίσθηση" και πιο απτά).Στο βιβλίο,συναντήθηκαν οι πιο ετερόκλητοι χαρακτήρες.Ο Claude,ένας τραπεζίτης που ψάχνει την αγάπη και του αρέσει ή τέχνη και η φιλοσοφία.Ο Paul,ένας συγγραφέας που λατρεύει τα στριπτιζάδικα και υποτίθεται θέλει να γράψει ένα βιβλίο για τον σύγχρονο "Everyman" (τον Claude). Βέβαια,το βιβλίο παίρνει φούντο (ή μάλλον δεν υπήρχε ποτέ προθ σή να υλοποιηθεί) και αποφασίζει να κλέψει την τράπεζα που δουλεύει ο Claude.Το σχέδιο ναυαγεί,και αποφασίζει να κάνει ενα σάιτ με τίτλο myhotswaitress.com (το περιεχόμενο μπορείτε να το καταλάβετε, νομίζω).Έχουμε τον συνεργάτη του τον Igor, έναν "ποιητή" και γενικά -εχμ-ιντελεκτουέλ τύπο ("Lately I have watched excellent film about Paris,” he says to Claude, by way of small talk. “In this film, three horny guys are going there and diddle many French prostitutes. Title of film is, Ass Menagerie II: French Connection. You have seen?”).Κα την Ariadne,την Ελληνίδα σερβιτόρα που αρέσει στον Claude, που ασχολείται με τη ζωγραφική.
Γενικά,το στόρι είναι τόσο απίστευτο που θα μπορούσε να είναι αληθινό.Ένας άλλος συγγραφέας,με την καταιγιστική δράση και το εξωφρενικό κλίμα,θα έχανε τη μπάλα.Ο Murray,όμως,χειρίζεται με απίστευτο τρόπο το υλικό του και το αποτέλεσμα είναι εκπληκτικό.
Για μια ακόμα φορά,ο Murray μ'έκανε να γελάσω.Σε ορισμένα σημεία,να δακρύσω από τα γέλια.Και να στενοχωρηθώ (λίγο). Οπότε,πρέπει να έγραψε άλλο ένα πολύ καλό βιβλίο (μετά το "Skippy Dies").
Στο βιβλίο αυτό σατιρίζει την οικονομική κρίση στην Ιρλανδία (αναφέροντας πολλές φορές την Ελλάδα),αλλά και τον σύγχρονο τρόπο ζωής,θα ελεγα.Θίγει και την ανάγκη για ουσιαστική επικοινωνία των ανθρώπων,κάτι που δεν μπορούν να καλύψουν τα σόσιαλ μίντια.Και ο ρόλος της τέχνης παίζει έναν ρόλο σ��ο βιβλίο (και σαν "αίσθηση" και πιο απτά).Στο βιβλίο,συναντήθηκαν οι πιο ετερόκλητοι χαρακτήρες.Ο Claude,ένας τραπεζίτης που ψάχνει την αγάπη και του αρέσει ή τέχνη και η φιλοσοφία.Ο Paul,ένας συγγραφέας που λατρεύει τα στριπτιζάδικα και υποτίθεται θέλει να γράψει ένα βιβλίο για τον σύγχρονο "Everyman" (τον Claude). Βέβαια,το βιβλίο παίρνει φούντο (ή μάλλον δεν υπήρχε ποτέ προθ σή να υλοποιηθεί) και αποφασίζει να κλέψει την τράπεζα που δουλεύει ο Claude.Το σχέδιο ναυαγεί,και αποφασίζει να κάνει ενα σάιτ με τίτλο myhotswaitress.com (το περιεχόμενο μπορείτε να το καταλάβετε, νομίζω).Έχουμε τον συνεργάτη του τον Igor, έναν "ποιητή" και γενικά -εχμ-ιντελεκτουέλ τύπο ("Lately I have watched excellent film about Paris,” he says to Claude, by way of small talk. “In this film, three horny guys are going there and diddle many French prostitutes. Title of film is, Ass Menagerie II: French Connection. You have seen?”).Κα την Ariadne,την Ελληνίδα σερβιτόρα που αρέσει στον Claude, που ασχολείται με τη ζωγραφική.
Γενικά,το στόρι είναι τόσο απίστευτο που θα μπορούσε να είναι αληθινό.Ένας άλλος συγγραφέας,με την καταιγιστική δράση και το εξωφρενικό κλίμα,θα έχανε τη μπάλα.Ο Murray,όμως,χειρίζεται με απίστευτο τρόπο το υλικό του και το αποτέλεσμα είναι εκπληκτικό.
March 2, 2016
The Mark and the Void is a book about duplicity. Small wonder, then, that it sets up dualities every step of the way.
It’s a book about finances…and the arts. It’s a tragedy…and a comedy. It’s about taking risks…and playing it safe. And, in turns, it’s serious and imaginative…and utterly messy and ridiculous.
Here, in essence, is the plot: a solitary French banker named Claude is working in Dublin for the Bank of Torabundo, an investment bank that prudently navigated the market crash and – because no deed goes unpunished – is now headed by a conscience-free new boss who chastises his employees for not taking enough chances. His doppelganger is a washed-up writer named Paul who approaches him with a concept: he wants to write about the life of an Everyman and has chosen Claude as his subject.
On the surface, these two men have little in common, but in truth, they are both “driven by the same urge to escape. The writer hides behind failure just as the banker hides behind wealth. They have lost faith in the world, and in themselves.” In some ways, they personify the book’s title: the push-pull between leaving your mark in the world and facing the void that is covered up with our doings. “The void comes from inside us, from deep inside us. And the more we try to escape it, the more we turn the world into a mirror. Of that emptiness.”
Had Paul Murray fully embraced that theme, this book would have been a six-star read. But the book begins detouring in all sorts of other directions. Claude is inexplicably drawn to Paul; it takes him far too long to figure out what he’s all about (the reader can sense what he’s about almost right away) and when he does, he still seeks him out like a moth to a flame. There are subplots galore: Paul’s infatuation with a (of course) stunningly beautiful Greek waitress named Ariadne and his Cyrano scheme to win her love. There’s a shadowy ex-KGB guy named Igor, a strip club, the lure of an exotic island, a website called myhotswaitress, a narcissistic best-selling writer, an online book review site (where you can give ratings of thistles or lightning bolts) and a proposed art heist of a painting called – no surprise – La Marque et Le Vide.
It’s a testimony to Paul Murray’s writing that through all these twists and turns, I hung on tight, always wanting to read on, never wanting to abandon ship. When he’s satirizing the banking system, he’s razor-sharp and – dare I say it – entertaining. At the end of the day, I’m left with wondering: how can a novel with so many flaws be so darn good?
It’s a book about finances…and the arts. It’s a tragedy…and a comedy. It’s about taking risks…and playing it safe. And, in turns, it’s serious and imaginative…and utterly messy and ridiculous.
Here, in essence, is the plot: a solitary French banker named Claude is working in Dublin for the Bank of Torabundo, an investment bank that prudently navigated the market crash and – because no deed goes unpunished – is now headed by a conscience-free new boss who chastises his employees for not taking enough chances. His doppelganger is a washed-up writer named Paul who approaches him with a concept: he wants to write about the life of an Everyman and has chosen Claude as his subject.
On the surface, these two men have little in common, but in truth, they are both “driven by the same urge to escape. The writer hides behind failure just as the banker hides behind wealth. They have lost faith in the world, and in themselves.” In some ways, they personify the book’s title: the push-pull between leaving your mark in the world and facing the void that is covered up with our doings. “The void comes from inside us, from deep inside us. And the more we try to escape it, the more we turn the world into a mirror. Of that emptiness.”
Had Paul Murray fully embraced that theme, this book would have been a six-star read. But the book begins detouring in all sorts of other directions. Claude is inexplicably drawn to Paul; it takes him far too long to figure out what he’s all about (the reader can sense what he’s about almost right away) and when he does, he still seeks him out like a moth to a flame. There are subplots galore: Paul’s infatuation with a (of course) stunningly beautiful Greek waitress named Ariadne and his Cyrano scheme to win her love. There’s a shadowy ex-KGB guy named Igor, a strip club, the lure of an exotic island, a website called myhotswaitress, a narcissistic best-selling writer, an online book review site (where you can give ratings of thistles or lightning bolts) and a proposed art heist of a painting called – no surprise – La Marque et Le Vide.
It’s a testimony to Paul Murray’s writing that through all these twists and turns, I hung on tight, always wanting to read on, never wanting to abandon ship. When he’s satirizing the banking system, he’s razor-sharp and – dare I say it – entertaining. At the end of the day, I’m left with wondering: how can a novel with so many flaws be so darn good?
August 9, 2015
Description: What links the Bank of Torabundo, an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a four-year-old boy named after TV detective Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB man? You guessed it...
The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray's madcap new novel of institutional folly, following the success of his wildly original Skippy Dies.
While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul's fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But can an investment banker be turned into a romantic hero, even with a writer on his side? And is Paul actually on Claude's side at all?
The Mark and the Void is a stirring examination of the deceptions carried out in the names of art, love and commerce - and is also probably the funniest novel ever written about a financial crisis.
February 22, 2016
The good news is that the Murray's satire is funny, in places it is so funny that I was that odd commuter chortling away to himself. The topic Murray picked is ripe for a tragi comedy, bankers working in Dublin post financial crises. One in particular, Claude, on the run from parental disapproval, lives a life of total isolation outside of work and is therefore delighted when a writer approaches him to be the subject of his new novel.
At its best the book does a great job of showing some of the bizarreness of the financial world, I particularly liked how the book showed the complete alienation of the people employed by the bank from the low tax regime they maybe located in. The open ending cast of characters in both the bank, and the writer are really good. Unfortunately as the book goes on the flashes of brilliance become rarer and rarer. The author starts to wander into more and more foreign territory for him and it shows as the book flattens out. Still bits of it were really funny.
At its best the book does a great job of showing some of the bizarreness of the financial world, I particularly liked how the book showed the complete alienation of the people employed by the bank from the low tax regime they maybe located in. The open ending cast of characters in both the bank, and the writer are really good. Unfortunately as the book goes on the flashes of brilliance become rarer and rarer. The author starts to wander into more and more foreign territory for him and it shows as the book flattens out. Still bits of it were really funny.
April 25, 2018
This book did not hold my interest very well. I shall give a full review at a later date.
Enjoy and Be Blessed.
Enjoy and Be Blessed.
February 9, 2017
I'm not sure I can recall another novel which nudged into my imagination in quite the same way as The Mark and the Void. It's a comic novel with a kernel of serious assertions, perhaps philosophic observation, at its center. Hilarious situations and dialogue swirl around this center as huge storms encircle Jupiter. Bits of Paul Murray's weightier views appear to have been torn from the novel's heavy core and can be encountered careening amidst the zany circulation around it.
Murray's a funny writer. He's created dialogue and circumstances and outlandish characters that'll make you smile and might make the bubble of a laugh rise in you. It's a novel of the recent financial crisis but located in Dublin where Claude Martingale is an analyst in the taxing work of making money for clients while rival banking institutions are ground out of existence beneath the groundswell of colossal failure. In the opening pages, at the outer rim of the swirling burlesque, we have Claude set up as mark by a would-be writer against the moral void of big financial institutions. This is like the big bang moment from which the novel expands in several directions and permutations of mark and void.
Murray is a skillful writer. While he makes you smile or chuckle he also makes you think. He writes interesting ways of seeing the modern technical world. Murray sees that technology has made us all more individual. We've used it to paper over the emptiness created between us and to analyze the encyclopedic array of facts it brings us as we try to recover systems of thought that'll bring the constantly changing shards of our lives into a reality. This point of view surfaces from time to time later in the novel in various disguises. They're derivatives. Murray enlarges the idea through reality becoming story built from images which are derivatives of the self, our chosen method of defeating death and time.
But this is just part of the dust spiraling around the dense center. In another sense the void is the center and the realities are the bits torn from it which Murray grabs to use as construction materials in his narrative. There's a painting called The Mark and the Void which is emblem for all this "cascading darkness," just as there are empty characters, clocks striking thirteen, Cyrano de Bergerac, a hoot of a boy named Remington Steele, and flowing through the middle of the narrative and Dublin itself the River Liffey (life) which Claude sometimes mistakes for Lethe (death).
I'd been impressed with the earlier Paul Murray novel Skippy Dies. About another type of institution, a boarding school for boys, it also weaves together hilarity with serious ideas. So I looked forward to The Mark and the Void and was rewarded. Now I look forward to what he does next.
Murray's a funny writer. He's created dialogue and circumstances and outlandish characters that'll make you smile and might make the bubble of a laugh rise in you. It's a novel of the recent financial crisis but located in Dublin where Claude Martingale is an analyst in the taxing work of making money for clients while rival banking institutions are ground out of existence beneath the groundswell of colossal failure. In the opening pages, at the outer rim of the swirling burlesque, we have Claude set up as mark by a would-be writer against the moral void of big financial institutions. This is like the big bang moment from which the novel expands in several directions and permutations of mark and void.
Murray is a skillful writer. While he makes you smile or chuckle he also makes you think. He writes interesting ways of seeing the modern technical world. Murray sees that technology has made us all more individual. We've used it to paper over the emptiness created between us and to analyze the encyclopedic array of facts it brings us as we try to recover systems of thought that'll bring the constantly changing shards of our lives into a reality. This point of view surfaces from time to time later in the novel in various disguises. They're derivatives. Murray enlarges the idea through reality becoming story built from images which are derivatives of the self, our chosen method of defeating death and time.
But this is just part of the dust spiraling around the dense center. In another sense the void is the center and the realities are the bits torn from it which Murray grabs to use as construction materials in his narrative. There's a painting called The Mark and the Void which is emblem for all this "cascading darkness," just as there are empty characters, clocks striking thirteen, Cyrano de Bergerac, a hoot of a boy named Remington Steele, and flowing through the middle of the narrative and Dublin itself the River Liffey (life) which Claude sometimes mistakes for Lethe (death).
I'd been impressed with the earlier Paul Murray novel Skippy Dies. About another type of institution, a boarding school for boys, it also weaves together hilarity with serious ideas. So I looked forward to The Mark and the Void and was rewarded. Now I look forward to what he does next.
June 14, 2015
You wouldn't expect to find much humour in an Irish investment bank during the demise of the Celtic Tiger, but Murray give us plenty! When I started reading I thought, here we go - another book about an author trying to write a book, but it quickly turns into something considerably more interesting. The plot is somewhat improbable and the protagonists have strange ideas about life, yet they somehow combine in a series of comically excruciating events.
I'm looking forward to the Mary Cutlass review ;)
I'm looking forward to the Mary Cutlass review ;)
December 1, 2015
(First appeared at http://www.thenewdorkreviewofbooks.co...)
If there's only one good thing to come out of the Great Recession, it's this hilarious novel. You may remember Paul Murray from Skippy Dies, a terrific, goofy novel about Irish prep school kids. Well, The Mark and the Void is terrific and goofy, too — but with a much more "serious" subject. I's a satire of two professions: Bankers and novelists. And you'll be surprised to find they have more in common than you might think.
"The financial corporation has become a machine for producing unreality," Murray tells us at one point, paraphrasing a philosopher several characters in the novel admire. And that's it: Just as writers produce fiction — which, frequently, life imitates — so too do bankers produce fiction which has real-life consequences. The entire world economy was brought to its knees by bankers inventing new investing mechanisms, and selling them to each other and naive consumers, and then betting they'd fail, and then inventing new ones, and going so deeply in debt that the only way to get out was to go further in debt so they'd be bailed out by government (which spent money much-needed for social services to save billionaires). All this ultimately created a vicious circle that is so absurd when you think about it (or read Murray's novel that makes it funny in a laugh-or-you'll-cry way), it really is the stuff of bad fiction.
Our protagonist here is a French banker named Claude, who works at a mid-sized investment bank in Dublin called Bank of Torabundo (Torabundo is a fictional island in the Pacific with lax tax laws. The bank is incorporated there. And Dublin has notoriously loose banking laws, so of course that's where the bank is headquartered.) One day, a novelist named Paul introduces himself, telling Claude he's working on a novel about an Everyman banker, and would like to shadow Paul for a few days to learn about what he does. Let's just say Paul has an ulterior motive.
And we go from there, alternating between Paul and Claude's often hilarious burgeoning friendship, and Claude's day-to-day often hilarious and absurd banking duties. Claude also has a love interest — a beautiful Greek waitress and painter. And he enlists the inept Paul's help to get the girl, often with truly comic consequences.
There is some real comedy gold in this novel — one example is a fake Forbes profile of the bank's new CEO, who broke into banking after professional golfing, who was rewarded with his new post because he crashed another bank, and whose wives keep "committing suicide." Another is a scene in which the Wolf of Wall Street-like dude named Howie takes a bunch of potential investors out for a crazy night of booze, coke, and strippers. It's exactly as you would imagine it.
I loved this book — it's a really, really smart satire populated with wonderful characters. And I learned more about the actual causes of the banking crisis from this novel than anywhere else. It finally makes sense how utterly absurd (and absurdly criminal!) it was/is. Very, very highly recommended.
If there's only one good thing to come out of the Great Recession, it's this hilarious novel. You may remember Paul Murray from Skippy Dies, a terrific, goofy novel about Irish prep school kids. Well, The Mark and the Void is terrific and goofy, too — but with a much more "serious" subject. I's a satire of two professions: Bankers and novelists. And you'll be surprised to find they have more in common than you might think.
"The financial corporation has become a machine for producing unreality," Murray tells us at one point, paraphrasing a philosopher several characters in the novel admire. And that's it: Just as writers produce fiction — which, frequently, life imitates — so too do bankers produce fiction which has real-life consequences. The entire world economy was brought to its knees by bankers inventing new investing mechanisms, and selling them to each other and naive consumers, and then betting they'd fail, and then inventing new ones, and going so deeply in debt that the only way to get out was to go further in debt so they'd be bailed out by government (which spent money much-needed for social services to save billionaires). All this ultimately created a vicious circle that is so absurd when you think about it (or read Murray's novel that makes it funny in a laugh-or-you'll-cry way), it really is the stuff of bad fiction.
Our protagonist here is a French banker named Claude, who works at a mid-sized investment bank in Dublin called Bank of Torabundo (Torabundo is a fictional island in the Pacific with lax tax laws. The bank is incorporated there. And Dublin has notoriously loose banking laws, so of course that's where the bank is headquartered.) One day, a novelist named Paul introduces himself, telling Claude he's working on a novel about an Everyman banker, and would like to shadow Paul for a few days to learn about what he does. Let's just say Paul has an ulterior motive.
And we go from there, alternating between Paul and Claude's often hilarious burgeoning friendship, and Claude's day-to-day often hilarious and absurd banking duties. Claude also has a love interest — a beautiful Greek waitress and painter. And he enlists the inept Paul's help to get the girl, often with truly comic consequences.
There is some real comedy gold in this novel — one example is a fake Forbes profile of the bank's new CEO, who broke into banking after professional golfing, who was rewarded with his new post because he crashed another bank, and whose wives keep "committing suicide." Another is a scene in which the Wolf of Wall Street-like dude named Howie takes a bunch of potential investors out for a crazy night of booze, coke, and strippers. It's exactly as you would imagine it.
I loved this book — it's a really, really smart satire populated with wonderful characters. And I learned more about the actual causes of the banking crisis from this novel than anywhere else. It finally makes sense how utterly absurd (and absurdly criminal!) it was/is. Very, very highly recommended.
July 13, 2015
This is a hilarious and very important novel about how our financial well-being essentially rests in the hands of gamblers, aka the banking system. Fate depends on where the moral compass is directed at any given moment in time. The story is told through the eyes of French banker, Claude, whose personal circumstances lead him to Dublin's (once) Fair City in the lead up to the financial crisis.
Murray has created a wonderful lead character who is professionally at the pinnacle, but emotionally vulnerable. Murray injects the novel with his unique wit and perspective and creates a page-turning caper that turns the mirror onto society as a whole, questioning in a highly original fashion the morality of capitalism, how we've all become addicted to modern mobile technology, data protection, personal insecurities, etc. to name but a few.
The plot and various sub-plots are equally captivating, thought-provoking and hilarious, delivered in Murray's unique style that anyone who has read Skippy Dies or An Evening of Long Goodbyes has become accustomed to. I can't do it justice with my review other that to recommend you read it and hope you enjoy as much as I did
Note: I will never be able to look at an aardvark the same way again
Murray has created a wonderful lead character who is professionally at the pinnacle, but emotionally vulnerable. Murray injects the novel with his unique wit and perspective and creates a page-turning caper that turns the mirror onto society as a whole, questioning in a highly original fashion the morality of capitalism, how we've all become addicted to modern mobile technology, data protection, personal insecurities, etc. to name but a few.
The plot and various sub-plots are equally captivating, thought-provoking and hilarious, delivered in Murray's unique style that anyone who has read Skippy Dies or An Evening of Long Goodbyes has become accustomed to. I can't do it justice with my review other that to recommend you read it and hope you enjoy as much as I did
Note: I will never be able to look at an aardvark the same way again
September 13, 2015
Oh, I don't know. He's so readable, smart, witty, humane; but so much of this was hard work - so much ickiness. I have to work out better how I feel about it. I think it's that 'comedy of pain' thing, like Fawlty Towers or The Office, that I can objectively appreciate but intuitively recoil from. Although there are some really funny things in here, and super-astute, but I think that's not what I wanted to read Murray for. Difficult Second Novel? Or maybe it's the subject matter, I do already feel like enough's enough on Global Financial Crisis literature.
Read
June 28, 2015Harder work than the wonderful Skippy Dies and An Evening Of Long Goodbyes, because the horror of zombie capitalism is too close to home and too crazy already to make easy material for comedy, even black comedy. And you can tell, not least from the metafictional games, that Murray did find it hard work. But in the end he manages it, producing a grand, wide-ranging and intermittently hilarious book comparable to the big American novels of a few years back. Trigger warning: banking.
July 15, 2016
Way too long
Could have been shorter
Skipped lots of it
Didn't laugh at all
Could guess the ending from the beginning
But the conversation parts were smooth
Could have been shorter
Skipped lots of it
Didn't laugh at all
Could guess the ending from the beginning
But the conversation parts were smooth
August 7, 2015
From BBC Radio 4 - Book at Bedtime:
What links the Bank of Torabundo, an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a four-year-old boy named after TV detective Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB man? You guessed it...
The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray's madcap new novel of institutional folly, following the success of his wildly original Skippy Dies.
While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul's fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But can an investment banker be turned into a romantic hero, even with a writer on his side? And is Paul actually on Claude's side at all?
The Mark and the Void is a stirring examination of the deceptions carried out in the names of art, love and commerce - and is also probably the funniest novel ever written about a financial crisis.
Abridged by Sara Davies.
Produced by Jenny Thompson.
Read by Peter Serafinowicz.
Music: Money by The Flying Lizards and Je Veux by Zaz.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0639k87
What links the Bank of Torabundo, an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a four-year-old boy named after TV detective Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB man? You guessed it...
The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray's madcap new novel of institutional folly, following the success of his wildly original Skippy Dies.
While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul's fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But can an investment banker be turned into a romantic hero, even with a writer on his side? And is Paul actually on Claude's side at all?
The Mark and the Void is a stirring examination of the deceptions carried out in the names of art, love and commerce - and is also probably the funniest novel ever written about a financial crisis.
Abridged by Sara Davies.
Produced by Jenny Thompson.
Read by Peter Serafinowicz.
Music: Money by The Flying Lizards and Je Veux by Zaz.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0639k87
September 19, 2021
Incredible piece of work describing our modern life and managing to be funny, entertaining and non-predictable. An interesting contrast with Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney, which takes up the same topic of alienation of the modern life, but does it in a morbidly boring and whiny way. Which is only to show that we still want stories. At the risk of sounding crude - Paul Murray IS the shit. This book should be read and enjoyed by everyone.
May 8, 2023
confused with these reviews cause this was 5 STARS BABY. a wonderful interpretation of the celtic tiger and the relationship of commodification and art and the struggles associated with modern capitalism
April 4, 2016
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although I never did get around to reading it, for a long time Paul Murray's previous novel Skippy Dies was on my wish list here at CCLaP, simply because people seemingly never stopped talking about it, even years after it had first come out; and now that I've read his newest, The Mark and the Void, I can see why that might be, because this is one of those books that literally keeps poking up in your consciousness even weeks after you've finished it. At its heart it's an angry indictment by an Irish native of the corrupt banking practices that both created the "Celtic Tiger" phenomenon of the early 2000s and that caused it to implode a decade later, faster than anyone could've guessed; but it's important to note right away that it's also a lot more than this, and that in fact this book would've largely been a failure if it had simply been an angry screed against the one-percenters. Instead it's also a surrealist comedy, in which a failed novelist tries pulling a scam on said bankers, whose pathetic and immediate failure hides a series of deeper and more unsettling scams under the surface of the first one; a world in which inept CEOs hire Russian theoretical mathematicians to invent algorithms to show that fiscal losses are actually fiscal profits, and where corporate headquarters are built on the sides of active volcanoes for the tax breaks involved. A true epic that bobs and weaves in and out of so many subplots in 460 pages to make your head spin, this is exactly how an angry indictment of a corrupt rich elite should be, funny and dark and infinitely digressive into a whole series of preposterous situations; and in fact the only reason that this book isn't getting an even higher score is that Murray ultimately can never truly get away from his earnest, Charles-Dickens-like anger over the coke-snorting financiers who bankrupted his country, a wearying type of political ranting that unfortunately pokes up its head on a regular basis in this book, despite it otherwise being so masterfully symbolic and laugh-out-loud funny. Other than that quibble, though, this is a hugely entertaining book that will likely be making our best-of lists at the end of the year, a truly historic look at the 2010s Economic Meltdown that comes strongly recommended to one and all.
Out of 10: 9.6
Although I never did get around to reading it, for a long time Paul Murray's previous novel Skippy Dies was on my wish list here at CCLaP, simply because people seemingly never stopped talking about it, even years after it had first come out; and now that I've read his newest, The Mark and the Void, I can see why that might be, because this is one of those books that literally keeps poking up in your consciousness even weeks after you've finished it. At its heart it's an angry indictment by an Irish native of the corrupt banking practices that both created the "Celtic Tiger" phenomenon of the early 2000s and that caused it to implode a decade later, faster than anyone could've guessed; but it's important to note right away that it's also a lot more than this, and that in fact this book would've largely been a failure if it had simply been an angry screed against the one-percenters. Instead it's also a surrealist comedy, in which a failed novelist tries pulling a scam on said bankers, whose pathetic and immediate failure hides a series of deeper and more unsettling scams under the surface of the first one; a world in which inept CEOs hire Russian theoretical mathematicians to invent algorithms to show that fiscal losses are actually fiscal profits, and where corporate headquarters are built on the sides of active volcanoes for the tax breaks involved. A true epic that bobs and weaves in and out of so many subplots in 460 pages to make your head spin, this is exactly how an angry indictment of a corrupt rich elite should be, funny and dark and infinitely digressive into a whole series of preposterous situations; and in fact the only reason that this book isn't getting an even higher score is that Murray ultimately can never truly get away from his earnest, Charles-Dickens-like anger over the coke-snorting financiers who bankrupted his country, a wearying type of political ranting that unfortunately pokes up its head on a regular basis in this book, despite it otherwise being so masterfully symbolic and laugh-out-loud funny. Other than that quibble, though, this is a hugely entertaining book that will likely be making our best-of lists at the end of the year, a truly historic look at the 2010s Economic Meltdown that comes strongly recommended to one and all.
Out of 10: 9.6
August 25, 2021
The ending made this book just better than ok but still not enough to say I truly liked this book.
I enjoyed the whole book in a book setup and had a d'oh moment when I realised that the authors name is Paul Murray and the main character's name is Paul.
Other than that though, the book felt too long. Whenever Paul wasn't in the book, it was boring and the while I appreciate that it's supposed be funny, the stupidity of nearly all the characters was just annoying. It didn't have the oomph to make you chuckle, more like roll your eyes.
All the shade thrown at the banking world got pretty laborious. It kind of felt like Murray was going for American Psycho vibes but just didn't deliver it as well.
Here I am turning in to Mary Cutlass, sorry Murray. Too much Void, not enough Mark.
I enjoyed the whole book in a book setup and had a d'oh moment when I realised that the authors name is Paul Murray and the main character's name is Paul.
Other than that though, the book felt too long. Whenever Paul wasn't in the book, it was boring and the while I appreciate that it's supposed be funny, the stupidity of nearly all the characters was just annoying. It didn't have the oomph to make you chuckle, more like roll your eyes.
All the shade thrown at the banking world got pretty laborious. It kind of felt like Murray was going for American Psycho vibes but just didn't deliver it as well.
Here I am turning in to Mary Cutlass, sorry Murray. Too much Void, not enough Mark.
December 4, 2015
Most 'funny' novels are lost on me. More often than not they produce eye rolls rather than laughs. The Mark and the Void is the exception. The comedic style herein is equal parts British droll, groan worthy dad jokes, and witty, intelligent television sitcom. Though it sounds like it'd be lumped with other 'funny' novels, for some reason this one clicked with me.
That it is also razor sharp satire lampooning the shadowy abstraction that is the global banking system, thus the foundation for global capitalism, doesn't hurt either.
That it is also razor sharp satire lampooning the shadowy abstraction that is the global banking system, thus the foundation for global capitalism, doesn't hurt either.
June 24, 2015
Brilliant. A super intelligent page-turner, full of humour and ideas and intrigue...Murray is a wonderfully original and daring writer and this was a total delight...I'll read it again soon, just to get all of the jokes and references and ideas that I know I missed the first time...there's so much to admire and love about this novel and, if you liked Skippy Dies, you'll love this.
June 9, 2015
Face achingly funny. Deftly self-referential. Whip smart.
May 18, 2016
I think sometimes fiction is better at explaining history than nonfiction.
Nonfiction is concerned with facts. Fiction is about meaning, and impact, and making sense of things. Or, to put it another way: nonfiction is science, but fiction is myth. The stories we tell help us explain the world we know (or don't.)
The Mark And The Void is the first fiction I've read about The Great Crash, as I think of it, that began back in 2007. It's hard to write about something dramatic that you've lived through, even indirectly, as a general rule. A momentous event is simply, I think, too big to make much sense out of immediately. That's one reason there's been no decent stories that in any measure take place on or around or about 9/11. Writing decently about something, at least in fiction, requires that the person be able to put it in perspective, and it's hard to do that without something so big and new as 9/11, or The Great Crash -- especially because we are, literally, still living through them. The wars we are fighting now, as well as the privacy issues around cell phones and the indiscriminate drone killings authorized by the President, are all direct results of 9/11 and the Authorization For Use Of Military Force passed 15 years ago, a law so broad that it allowed the President to unilaterally act without Congressional approval in everything from Afghanistan to Seal Team 6's raid on bin Laden's compound to strikes against ISIS.
Similarly, The Great Crash has not ended. In 2014 the number of unemployment benefit claims roughly equaled the number filed in 2007. Our unemployment rate is 50% higher -- 6.7% in 2014 -- than it was in 2007. Only 62.5% of Americans are in the workforce; that's the lowest it's been in 35 years. Job openings are lower than they were in 2007. The 2007-2014 period of time was the worst period for job creation since the 1930s, during the Great Depression. And so on. I work in this mire: I spend great chunks of time every day helping people try to hold on to homes and stave off debt collectors, get out from under onerous student loans and away from subprime credit traps.
That's one reason I avoid stories about the events of 2007 and after; I (re)live them every day. Another reason, though, is, as I said, the lack of perspective, the lack of an ability to say something meaningful about the economic collapse we are still suffering.
The Mark And The Void takes place during the Crash, and is, essentially, about it, even when it seems as if it's not. The story focuses on Claude, a French banker who works in a global bank's Dublin headquarters; the bank has survived the initial wave of the collapse because it was stodgy and stable and the CEO wouldn't allow investments into risky and unusual financial tools.
The story is this: Claude is followed for a while by a 'man in black,' who turns out to be a writer named Paul. Paul, who had a very minor book released 7 years earlier, tells Claude he wants to write a modern-day Ulysses, and use Claude as his Leopold Bloom, and asks if he can shadow Claude for a while to get the details of his life. Claude's bosses okay this, and Paul moves in to the bank. At the same time, the Bank (Bank of Torabundo, referred to as "BOT" throughout the book) has replaced its CEO with "Porter Blankly," a dashing sort of Richard-Branson-esque leader whose directives to his staff are couched in inspirational riddles and say things like "Think counterintuitive."
As it turns out, Paul is not a writer, really, and he is using Claude to get inside the bank to try to rob it; Paul doesn't know that investment banks, like BOT, don't have 'deposits,' and so there is no safe to rob. By the time Claude figures this out, he has been ensnared by Paul; Paul's attempts to convince Claude the book was real and describe some plot get Claude to start falling in love with a local waitress (Paul's twist in the book he proposes) and Claude decides he wants to help Paul write his book after all.
It's hard to boil everything that happens down to an explainable level; the book has several different plots going on and they overlap; Claude's history (raised by a blacksmith, in the 1980s, in Paris) is gone into, and subplots abound.
Then there are, too, the scenes that seem de rigeur for books like this, books like The Great Gatsby and Bonfire Of The Vanities (this book is the equal of both): bankers partying at strip clubs, bread lines, hedge fund offices opulent beyond measure, squalid apartments for middle class people. Those are the trappings of a book like this and need to be there.
What really hits home in The Mark And The Void is the way it manages to capture all the problems that led to the Crash (and continue it) without being didactic.
Take the machinations of investment banks, the twists that lead governments to support them. BOT under Porter Blankly begins buying risky venture after risky venture, leveraging itself beyond all respectability and taking on more and more bad debt, and it's finally revealed that Blankly plants to make the bank "too big to fail." The idea is that if the investments pay off, the Bank will profit insanely. But if the investments go south, the various governments will have to bail out the bank to avoid further economic troubles.
It's both absurd and genius, the kind of thing that makes you think I don't want to believe this could actually be true but... Consider: after Iowa (!) became the state that first passed laws that led to megabanks, banks grew so large and so powerful that Citicorp in 1999 simply ignored federal law in merging with Travelers Group. As soon as the crash started, the current big banks -- JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America -- began purchasing all the banks that had just crashed. Those banks then received $95,000,000,000 in bailout funds (with Citigroup getting another $45,000,000,000.) (Meanwhile, 70% of applicants for the government's home mortgage modification program are denied.)
The absurd genius of that move is compared to Paul's efforts: throughout the book Paul tries one get-rich-quick scheme after another, giving various excuses as to why he simply won't write a book his publisher wants him to write: everything from the novel is dead to I have nobody who believes in me and so on. So Paul tries to start websites, bilks more money from Claude and comes up with an idea to steal a painting from the home of a banker boyfriend of a well-known author. The machinations of Porter Blankly and Paul are compared to each other, and in case there's any doubt about whether they're comparable, the characters mention that doing what Porter Blankly is doing at the track is gambling; do it with billions of dollars of other people's money and it's financial maneuvering.
One of the subplots involves Howie, a coworker of Claude's. Howie makes some shrewd moves and Blankly sets him up to run a hedge fund that is based on abstract Russian mathematics; Howie explains that the fund is premised on leveraging people's losses, and says that the more the fund loses the more money his investors make. When Claude protests that that's impossible, Howie says Claude just doesn't understand how advanced maths work.
"Beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud," writer P.J. O'Rourke once said. Consider the "credit default swap," a derivative invented in 1994. The basic idea is essentially interest against a loan default: a lender can purchase a 'Credit Default Swap," and if the loan defaults, the Swap seller pays the lender the value of the loan (usually) and takes over the asset. Simple, right?
Right. Except that anyone can buy a Credit Default Swap, even someone who has no actual interest in the loan. Which is to say: anyone (who is a billionaire or multinational) can buy a financial instrument that will pay them a sum of money if a loan (which they did not make and will not receive proceeds from) defaults. This feature led to there being more Credit Default Swaps in existence than actual loans they 'protected.' This is like several people having a life insurance policy on you, including people who you do not know and who do not know you; in the event that several people held a Swap on a defaulted loan, a system was invented to determine how much to pay each person -- less than face value but more than the cost of buying the Swap, one assumes. Credit Default Swaps were not tracked or monitored or reported. They still are not. Banks could buy Swaps on their own loans (although the instruments were FAR more sophisticated -- and complicated -- than this example) which meant that the Bank made money if you paid your loan, or if you defaulted.
So a bank might make you a loan of $100,000. If you pay it back, with interest, you pay the bank, say $200,000 over time. The bank runs a risk though: if you don't pay it back, they have to foreclose or sue, and that costs money. But there's an asset behind many loans, a house, say, so the bank has less risk: it will recover some money. Under these circumstances, banks have to be careful of the risk of a loan: make a bad choice and it loses $100,000, at least until it hires a lawyer and gets title to the house and sells it (but because of the realities of real estate, the Bank is unlikely to recover even it's whole $100,000 original investment.)
With trading of mortgages, banks became less concerned if you defaulted. Banks were paid loan origination fees, then could sell the loan for face value or slightly less: if they lent you $100,000, a portion of that (say 7000) would be paid to the Bank as an origination fee, so you only get $93,000 (or the Bank only shells out $93,000.) It can then sell the loan to another bank, for $94,000 or more, and make a quick $1000 on the deal -- without worrying about risk. Now banks can make riskier loans.
Swaps make that worse, because the bank can get a swap and pay (usually 1.5% of the loan's value per year) for protection. If your bank does that, for $1500 a year it gets insurance on the face value of the loan. If you default in year three, the Bank will have given you $93,000, paid $4500 in Swap fees, for total payouts of $97,500. Most of your payments in those 3 years are interest, so the Bank's principal is probably still about $90,000. The Swap holder pays the Bank $90,000 and takes over your loan. The Swap holder's investment is $85,500 -- $90,000 to the bank, less the $4500 it received in premiums. Assuming your house is worth $93,000 (100% financing was pretty common by 2007) the Swap holder could get a return of $8000 on its investment, less attorney's fees. (Most foreclosures are uncontested and the average attorney fee for such a case, at least in Wisconsin, would be under $1500.)
And this is just the surface of the complexity that exists, because Banks could buy Swaps in all sorts of loans. Suppose you know of 5 loans that are likely to default, each with face amounts of $100,000? Pay $1500 per loan -- $7500 -- and you have an interest in $500,000 worth of debt that, depending on how many other Swap holders there are, you will get a decent share of. Almost certainly more than $7500, it seems.
That's the system that we created, and is it any wonder nobody cared anymore if loans failed? Banks made more money if they did.
Against a backdrop like that, is stealing a priceless painting any less ethical, or ridiculous, as a method of earning money? Banks were too big to fail; homeowners were too small to succeed.
Like The Bonfire Of The Vanities, and like The Great Gatsby, The Mark And The Void perfectly captures the essence of an era, with an attention to detail and accuracy that is startling, but with a flair for the human, and the interesting, that makes the book less about what a hedge fund is than what kind of world did we create, and how will we live in it? The scene of Gatsby floating in his pool, after night after night of staring at the green light is no less tragic than the picture of Sherman McCoy standing in a holding cell in a damp suit with styrofoam peanuts stuck to his legs, and those two scenes are no more or less remarkable than the episode where Paul's son Remington finds an ant at a park and asks if he can keep him as a pet -- only to later have the ant escape, requiring the family to tear apart an apartment that is already falling to pieces and is half-finished.
For all that, it's a remarkably buoyant book, funny and fast-paced and somehow almost lighthearted. It's a story within a story within a tragedy, as if two wrongs do make a right and enough tragedy somehow becomes comedy again. Comedy is simply tragedy plus time, it's said. The Crash isn't over yet, but it seems somehow not to have stuck. The people of the Depression, of World War II, of Vietnam, were forever changed by their eras. My grandmother saved paper bags until she was 90. My grandfather had PTSD and used to wake up screaming about the "Japs coming up the beach."
Somewhere along the way, tragedy stopped mattering. By the 1980s, scandals and wars and crashes seemed to not matter anymore. There have been numerous financial bailouts, cuts in spending, recessions, bubbles, wars, and terrorism over the last 30 years. We are not numbed to them; they have simply stopped existing in the same world as we do. The world has grown so complex that even when we know where the trouble started, we never trace it back or address it. We simply shrug and make a sad joke about it and then let a new startup company move into the old space while trying to decide if we should vote to the millionaire or the billionaire to speak for the people.
Comedy is tragedy plus time? I think not. Comedy is any effort to understand humanity, because if we laugh hard enough we don't have to notice that nothing is funny.
It's a good book. You should read it.
Nonfiction is concerned with facts. Fiction is about meaning, and impact, and making sense of things. Or, to put it another way: nonfiction is science, but fiction is myth. The stories we tell help us explain the world we know (or don't.)
The Mark And The Void is the first fiction I've read about The Great Crash, as I think of it, that began back in 2007. It's hard to write about something dramatic that you've lived through, even indirectly, as a general rule. A momentous event is simply, I think, too big to make much sense out of immediately. That's one reason there's been no decent stories that in any measure take place on or around or about 9/11. Writing decently about something, at least in fiction, requires that the person be able to put it in perspective, and it's hard to do that without something so big and new as 9/11, or The Great Crash -- especially because we are, literally, still living through them. The wars we are fighting now, as well as the privacy issues around cell phones and the indiscriminate drone killings authorized by the President, are all direct results of 9/11 and the Authorization For Use Of Military Force passed 15 years ago, a law so broad that it allowed the President to unilaterally act without Congressional approval in everything from Afghanistan to Seal Team 6's raid on bin Laden's compound to strikes against ISIS.
Similarly, The Great Crash has not ended. In 2014 the number of unemployment benefit claims roughly equaled the number filed in 2007. Our unemployment rate is 50% higher -- 6.7% in 2014 -- than it was in 2007. Only 62.5% of Americans are in the workforce; that's the lowest it's been in 35 years. Job openings are lower than they were in 2007. The 2007-2014 period of time was the worst period for job creation since the 1930s, during the Great Depression. And so on. I work in this mire: I spend great chunks of time every day helping people try to hold on to homes and stave off debt collectors, get out from under onerous student loans and away from subprime credit traps.
That's one reason I avoid stories about the events of 2007 and after; I (re)live them every day. Another reason, though, is, as I said, the lack of perspective, the lack of an ability to say something meaningful about the economic collapse we are still suffering.
The Mark And The Void takes place during the Crash, and is, essentially, about it, even when it seems as if it's not. The story focuses on Claude, a French banker who works in a global bank's Dublin headquarters; the bank has survived the initial wave of the collapse because it was stodgy and stable and the CEO wouldn't allow investments into risky and unusual financial tools.
The story is this: Claude is followed for a while by a 'man in black,' who turns out to be a writer named Paul. Paul, who had a very minor book released 7 years earlier, tells Claude he wants to write a modern-day Ulysses, and use Claude as his Leopold Bloom, and asks if he can shadow Claude for a while to get the details of his life. Claude's bosses okay this, and Paul moves in to the bank. At the same time, the Bank (Bank of Torabundo, referred to as "BOT" throughout the book) has replaced its CEO with "Porter Blankly," a dashing sort of Richard-Branson-esque leader whose directives to his staff are couched in inspirational riddles and say things like "Think counterintuitive."
As it turns out, Paul is not a writer, really, and he is using Claude to get inside the bank to try to rob it; Paul doesn't know that investment banks, like BOT, don't have 'deposits,' and so there is no safe to rob. By the time Claude figures this out, he has been ensnared by Paul; Paul's attempts to convince Claude the book was real and describe some plot get Claude to start falling in love with a local waitress (Paul's twist in the book he proposes) and Claude decides he wants to help Paul write his book after all.
It's hard to boil everything that happens down to an explainable level; the book has several different plots going on and they overlap; Claude's history (raised by a blacksmith, in the 1980s, in Paris) is gone into, and subplots abound.
Then there are, too, the scenes that seem de rigeur for books like this, books like The Great Gatsby and Bonfire Of The Vanities (this book is the equal of both): bankers partying at strip clubs, bread lines, hedge fund offices opulent beyond measure, squalid apartments for middle class people. Those are the trappings of a book like this and need to be there.
What really hits home in The Mark And The Void is the way it manages to capture all the problems that led to the Crash (and continue it) without being didactic.
Take the machinations of investment banks, the twists that lead governments to support them. BOT under Porter Blankly begins buying risky venture after risky venture, leveraging itself beyond all respectability and taking on more and more bad debt, and it's finally revealed that Blankly plants to make the bank "too big to fail." The idea is that if the investments pay off, the Bank will profit insanely. But if the investments go south, the various governments will have to bail out the bank to avoid further economic troubles.
It's both absurd and genius, the kind of thing that makes you think I don't want to believe this could actually be true but... Consider: after Iowa (!) became the state that first passed laws that led to megabanks, banks grew so large and so powerful that Citicorp in 1999 simply ignored federal law in merging with Travelers Group. As soon as the crash started, the current big banks -- JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America -- began purchasing all the banks that had just crashed. Those banks then received $95,000,000,000 in bailout funds (with Citigroup getting another $45,000,000,000.) (Meanwhile, 70% of applicants for the government's home mortgage modification program are denied.)
The absurd genius of that move is compared to Paul's efforts: throughout the book Paul tries one get-rich-quick scheme after another, giving various excuses as to why he simply won't write a book his publisher wants him to write: everything from the novel is dead to I have nobody who believes in me and so on. So Paul tries to start websites, bilks more money from Claude and comes up with an idea to steal a painting from the home of a banker boyfriend of a well-known author. The machinations of Porter Blankly and Paul are compared to each other, and in case there's any doubt about whether they're comparable, the characters mention that doing what Porter Blankly is doing at the track is gambling; do it with billions of dollars of other people's money and it's financial maneuvering.
One of the subplots involves Howie, a coworker of Claude's. Howie makes some shrewd moves and Blankly sets him up to run a hedge fund that is based on abstract Russian mathematics; Howie explains that the fund is premised on leveraging people's losses, and says that the more the fund loses the more money his investors make. When Claude protests that that's impossible, Howie says Claude just doesn't understand how advanced maths work.
"Beyond a certain point, complexity is fraud," writer P.J. O'Rourke once said. Consider the "credit default swap," a derivative invented in 1994. The basic idea is essentially interest against a loan default: a lender can purchase a 'Credit Default Swap," and if the loan defaults, the Swap seller pays the lender the value of the loan (usually) and takes over the asset. Simple, right?
Right. Except that anyone can buy a Credit Default Swap, even someone who has no actual interest in the loan. Which is to say: anyone (who is a billionaire or multinational) can buy a financial instrument that will pay them a sum of money if a loan (which they did not make and will not receive proceeds from) defaults. This feature led to there being more Credit Default Swaps in existence than actual loans they 'protected.' This is like several people having a life insurance policy on you, including people who you do not know and who do not know you; in the event that several people held a Swap on a defaulted loan, a system was invented to determine how much to pay each person -- less than face value but more than the cost of buying the Swap, one assumes. Credit Default Swaps were not tracked or monitored or reported. They still are not. Banks could buy Swaps on their own loans (although the instruments were FAR more sophisticated -- and complicated -- than this example) which meant that the Bank made money if you paid your loan, or if you defaulted.
So a bank might make you a loan of $100,000. If you pay it back, with interest, you pay the bank, say $200,000 over time. The bank runs a risk though: if you don't pay it back, they have to foreclose or sue, and that costs money. But there's an asset behind many loans, a house, say, so the bank has less risk: it will recover some money. Under these circumstances, banks have to be careful of the risk of a loan: make a bad choice and it loses $100,000, at least until it hires a lawyer and gets title to the house and sells it (but because of the realities of real estate, the Bank is unlikely to recover even it's whole $100,000 original investment.)
With trading of mortgages, banks became less concerned if you defaulted. Banks were paid loan origination fees, then could sell the loan for face value or slightly less: if they lent you $100,000, a portion of that (say 7000) would be paid to the Bank as an origination fee, so you only get $93,000 (or the Bank only shells out $93,000.) It can then sell the loan to another bank, for $94,000 or more, and make a quick $1000 on the deal -- without worrying about risk. Now banks can make riskier loans.
Swaps make that worse, because the bank can get a swap and pay (usually 1.5% of the loan's value per year) for protection. If your bank does that, for $1500 a year it gets insurance on the face value of the loan. If you default in year three, the Bank will have given you $93,000, paid $4500 in Swap fees, for total payouts of $97,500. Most of your payments in those 3 years are interest, so the Bank's principal is probably still about $90,000. The Swap holder pays the Bank $90,000 and takes over your loan. The Swap holder's investment is $85,500 -- $90,000 to the bank, less the $4500 it received in premiums. Assuming your house is worth $93,000 (100% financing was pretty common by 2007) the Swap holder could get a return of $8000 on its investment, less attorney's fees. (Most foreclosures are uncontested and the average attorney fee for such a case, at least in Wisconsin, would be under $1500.)
And this is just the surface of the complexity that exists, because Banks could buy Swaps in all sorts of loans. Suppose you know of 5 loans that are likely to default, each with face amounts of $100,000? Pay $1500 per loan -- $7500 -- and you have an interest in $500,000 worth of debt that, depending on how many other Swap holders there are, you will get a decent share of. Almost certainly more than $7500, it seems.
That's the system that we created, and is it any wonder nobody cared anymore if loans failed? Banks made more money if they did.
Against a backdrop like that, is stealing a priceless painting any less ethical, or ridiculous, as a method of earning money? Banks were too big to fail; homeowners were too small to succeed.
Like The Bonfire Of The Vanities, and like The Great Gatsby, The Mark And The Void perfectly captures the essence of an era, with an attention to detail and accuracy that is startling, but with a flair for the human, and the interesting, that makes the book less about what a hedge fund is than what kind of world did we create, and how will we live in it? The scene of Gatsby floating in his pool, after night after night of staring at the green light is no less tragic than the picture of Sherman McCoy standing in a holding cell in a damp suit with styrofoam peanuts stuck to his legs, and those two scenes are no more or less remarkable than the episode where Paul's son Remington finds an ant at a park and asks if he can keep him as a pet -- only to later have the ant escape, requiring the family to tear apart an apartment that is already falling to pieces and is half-finished.
For all that, it's a remarkably buoyant book, funny and fast-paced and somehow almost lighthearted. It's a story within a story within a tragedy, as if two wrongs do make a right and enough tragedy somehow becomes comedy again. Comedy is simply tragedy plus time, it's said. The Crash isn't over yet, but it seems somehow not to have stuck. The people of the Depression, of World War II, of Vietnam, were forever changed by their eras. My grandmother saved paper bags until she was 90. My grandfather had PTSD and used to wake up screaming about the "Japs coming up the beach."
Somewhere along the way, tragedy stopped mattering. By the 1980s, scandals and wars and crashes seemed to not matter anymore. There have been numerous financial bailouts, cuts in spending, recessions, bubbles, wars, and terrorism over the last 30 years. We are not numbed to them; they have simply stopped existing in the same world as we do. The world has grown so complex that even when we know where the trouble started, we never trace it back or address it. We simply shrug and make a sad joke about it and then let a new startup company move into the old space while trying to decide if we should vote to the millionaire or the billionaire to speak for the people.
Comedy is tragedy plus time? I think not. Comedy is any effort to understand humanity, because if we laugh hard enough we don't have to notice that nothing is funny.
It's a good book. You should read it.
January 29, 2019
I very rarely fail to finish a novel because, as a writer myself, I feel I owe it to fellow writers to give maximum respect to their efforts. However, I had to give up on this one despite enjoying the first hundred pages. The problem I feel is that Paul Murray is too clever and witty for his own good. This book is a satire on the banking crisis and the collapse of the Celtic tiger economy as well as being a piece of meta-fiction. If it had been 250 pages long, I might have stuck with it but at 450, it just seemed to be meandering, drifting from banking office to coffee shop with occasional visits to lap dancing clubs. What seems fresh and funny at the start, soon becomes repetitive. And Claude, the main character, is an unconvincing cipher.
March 27, 2017
Meta book on financial industry ala 2008. Meta because book is 'about' an author supposedly writing a book about a banker at a non-consumer bank. Yet the author is a scammer- and yet (also) the banker befriends the author and tries to help him. Lots of scenes the purpose of which is to reveal the moral bankruptcy of the financial industry. Yet not dark in tone. Didn't agree the the blurb-writers on the back of the book- not funny per se- more head nodding, ahhh-ing type read. Liked Skippy Dies more- but glad someone is turning financial ruin of western world into quality fiction that isn't 100% bleak.
May 15, 2024
I struggled with this. It seemed appealing banking, coffee shop, Dublin, financial crisis but the real plot line just wasn’t there. Read lots of reviews and understand why many didn’t finish the book. Paul can write and there’s some great side stories and amusing moments but not hilarious as the blurb said, and 200 pages too long.
March 31, 2017
3.5 Stars. I wanted to like this book more but it just didn't keep me that engaged and interested. There was definitely some of the great Paul Murray satire/humor which I loved, but not enough of an interesting story or plot line to keep me reading as addictively as I normally would. While I enjoyed this book, I still hoped it would be more similar to An Evening of Long Goodbyes (by far one of my favorites of all time).
October 5, 2020
This is a great satire and ultimately kind of heartbreaking book set in a fictional post 2008 crash era banking world of Ireland. At first I thought the main character was going to be too stupid to follow (even for satire), but then you slowly slip behind his gaze, especially as more is revealed about the characters around him. A brutal look at the stupidity of banking.
February 20, 2019
Het is een grappig verhaal, erg gebeurt een hoop, het voelt authentiek, maar... mij raakt het onvoldoende.
Misschien moest ik het in het Engels lezen?
Misschien moest ik het in het Engels lezen?
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