Cash, Comfort and the Genesis of Literary Monsters by Henry Sutton / Features / Untitled Books

"John Self is the guy who’s so lacking in morals, he almost becomes saintly in his devotion to hedonism."

Cash, Comfort and the Genesis of Literary Monsters by Henry Sutton

Set against London's creaking financial industry in the autumn of 2008, Henry Sutton's novel Get Me Out of Here holds a mirrror up to city greed in the noughties. Here he traces the rise and fall of money men in fiction, from Jay Gatsby to Patrick Bateman.

Dire situations and monstrous characters go hand and hand with satire and comedy.

Embarking upon my new novel a question kept reverberating in my head. Where had all the monsters gone? The Patrick Batemans, the Sherman McCoys, the John Selfs? Seemingly for ages we were bombarded by chivalry, nicety, blokes eventually doing the right thing.

Comfy stories certainly came of age in the mid-noughties, mid-afternoon, on Channel 4. There was Kate Mosse's tangled but ultimately life-enhancing Labyrinth and Victoria Hislop's heart-wrenchingly lovely The Island. There were numerous other tales also of course, where the men were tall and handsome and the women perfectly stacked too. Despite earlier complications the denouements never failed to lift the most jaded spirits, as Judy Finnigan and Richard Madeley encouraged endless fawning and relentless sales. No bad thing, naturally, for an industry prone to collective misanthropy. The glass had long been half empty.

Yet somehow, across the nation's lounges and libraries, aided perhaps by 14.5 per cent proof Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, a consensus among the book-buying, if not quite book-reading public, emerged. Namely, it wasn't just good enough to fall in love with the story; you had to fall in love with the main character. Novels had become aide memoirs for Relate counsellors. 'This is how you do it,' you could almost hear them saying. 'This is how you overcome those tricky patches.'

Over-generalisations aside, the noughties certainly gave rise to a discernibly gushy literary modus operandi. The thing that makes this so surprising is that relatively we were all sitting pretty. OK, wars continued to be fought. Extremism and prejudice kept rearing its appalling head. But the bars and the banks were heaving. Largess had morphed into a sort of communal, seemingly endless round of loving it and larging it. And fiction was certainly not going to ruin the party. While it's a long and commonly held belief that people resort to security, to comfort, to escapism at times of great strife, this doesn't quite tally with what appeared to have happened with literary taste and productivity over the last decade or two. People just wanted more of the same. And then, suddenly post Northern Rock, post Lehman Brothers, things really did get tough, at home.

Or maybe they had been increasingly tough and troubled, for years, with people not just refusing to acknowledge the signs, the facts, but persisting with their warming fictional fantasies. Habits are hard to break. Just as prescience is hard to properly gauge. However, lurking in the shadows, behind that sofa, there were of course those exceptional and exceptionally troubling novels that saw the beginning, middle and end of what must surely be seen as the hedged-boom - the longest and most extreme period of wealth creation the world has ever seen.

And most notably, and perhaps unsurprisingly, these novels all feature pretty foul central characters. It's as if serious financial flux doesn't just throw up deeply disturbed and deranged individuals, but forces us to contemplate contemporary, predominantly metropolitan morality. At the very least bad guys make surprisingly good fiction. Look for the signs, catch the drift earlier enough, they can also act as a socio-economic barometer.

There's a modern precursor, however, which shouldn't go unmentioned. The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, obviously four years before the Wall Street Crash and the onset of the Great Depression, can be seen as a hugely prescient comment on the fragility of a gilded age, with Jay Gatsby, in the suave, but ultimately deluded and duplicitous starring role. Notions of literary unreliability shifted as modernism became post-modernism, and characters' psychologies, like prose styles, weren't expected to be anything other than unexpected.

However, like no doubt the trading floors and M&A war rooms, there's no getting away from big, brash, unremittingly crass guys, and a few lethally quiet and removed ones too, stalking the fine print of some seminal, arguably prescient post, post war and early 21^st century fictions.

Martin Amis' Money, published in 1984, though set in 1981, came out at a time when Reagan had gone on a deficit-making spending spree, and the money markets in both New York and London were beginning to boom thanks to a programme of public deregulation and the private implementation of fancy new products in the form of ever more complex derivatives. The novel follows advertising director John Self as he flies between New York and London, with a wad of soiled notes. He's the guy who's so lacking in morals, he almost becomes saintly in his devotion to hedonism. Amis, it seems now - and a fact that has not been missed by the BBC, who are finally making Money into a mini-series - seemed to have sized up the future, looked at the sudden rampant creed overwhelming the world's biggest financial centres and proclaimed that money was the new culture, or what we had in place of culture.

John Self's only real turn on is money. At one point Self thinks, regarding his on-off girlfriend Selina Street (to be played by Jerry Hall): "While making love, we often talk about money. I like it. I like that dirty talk." Not for nothing is the book subtitled 'A Suicide Note'.

Sherman McCoy, the antihero of Tom Wolfe's international bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities - first published in book form in 1987 - is of course a bond trader and self-proclaimed 'master of the universe'. This was Wolfe's first stab at fiction and for research the author did time on the then highly innovative derivatives trading floor of Salomon Brothers (which became part of the Citigroup, to be humiliatingly bailed out by the US government in 2008). Wolfe was certainly in the right place at the right time to shape a character, an epitome of his time and place, who was again seriously lacking in moral fibre, and whom, while trying to cover up an accident involving his Merc and a young black man in deepest Bronx, orchestrates his own almighty downfall.

When Bret Easton Ellis' outrageously depraved novel American Psycho came out in 1991, the world had got used to mega-rich bankers and their disregard for common decency and community spirit - it was me, me, me alright. But the theoretical brutality of Ellis's anti-hero Patrick Bateman was still shocking. As was the way Ellis - and this was a literary first - specifically linked brand worship with cultural vacuity. Bateman is either a delusional psychotic, or a psychopath and is the very essence of a post, post-modern unreliable narrator. That he's in high finance seems only natural, as does the way he muddles in his mind the riff "mergers and acquisitions" with "murders and executions".

While offering a much more apocalyptic vision of corporate excess than anything that had come before, the novel nevertheless was firmly entrenched in a time when derivative trading was still on a roll, regardless of any social/anti-social knock-on effects. Seemingly the Batemans of this, or rather that world - love them or loathe them - were going to keep on coming.

Always ahead of the game, Don DeLillo, to my mind, was the first literary giant to signal the beginning of the end. Sure his Underworld, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, was an effectively great, sweeping state of the nation tome, but it was his slim, often misunderstood if not missed entirely, 2003 novel Cosmopolis that not only set the tone for the forthcoming bust, but charted, quite specifically, the hollow and terminal craziness of hedge funds, and the very striking human, not to mention intellectual consequences. The main character, Eric Packer, is a multi-billionaire hedge funder, with a 48-room apartment and a decommissioned nuclear bomber as his boys' toy. Though not exactly threatening and violent himself, as the markets inexplicably begin to wobble, so Packer urgently begins to question not just his existence but the concept and sudden likelihood of his own bloody demise.

Packer is a product of a time when the only thing that mattered was money, the number itself. At one point DeLillo writes: "The market wants you to believe there are foreseeable trends and forces. When in fact it's all random phenomena. You apply mathematics and other disciplines, yes. But in the end you're dealing with a system that's out of control." What DeLillo was saying, and way back in 2003 (the novel's actually set in 2000) was that money had lost all substance, and with it society had lost sense of itself.

John Self, Sherman McCoy, Patrick Bateman and the sublimely removed and relentlessly distracted Eric Packer, were the sadly all too necessary monsters that epitomised the times and arguably predicted the worst. Yet, they are also fascinating, complex and wonderfully threatening and challenging literary creations that attest to why fiction is so necessary to a world ever more dependent on fact, if not things. Money, The Bonfire of the Vanities, American Psycho and Cosmopolis, and of course The Great Gatsby, also show why writers, why novelists, can sometimes see something before other people see it, something that clearly exists but is not necessarily observable to most people.

The sofa's a lovely place for a chat and a snooze, but don't hide behind it. You never quite know whom you might bump into next. And the stories they might tell. What's more - and this was one of the guiding premises behind my new novel - horrible doesn't have to mean humourless. Dire situations and monstrous characters go hand and hand with satire and comedy. Just as you need light to see in the dark, so you need laughter to get you through the despair. As Kim Jong-il, the Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (otherwise known as North Korea) famously said, "Great ideology creates great times." Which can either make you laugh, or weep.

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Get Me Out Of Here is published by Harvill Secker

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Wednesday, 27 January, 2010

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Untitled Books

Issue 20 / February - March 2010

"John Self is the guy who’s so lacking in morals, he almost becomes saintly in his devotion to hedonism."