Almost gave up on this. Too much on hedge-funding, which I didn't understand. ( )

A positively heroic attempt to write a satiric roman a clef that explores contemporary London, thrillers, the radicalism of Islamic youth, the ethics of high finance, modern literarure, psychosis, television, virtual reality, porn, and football. All this and much more is examined within the bounds of a single week in December 2007. At first I thought that Faulks was remarkable for creating so many diverse credible characters until I realised that, as a middle-aged middle class white man who had even shared some of his physical landscape, I was likely to share his world view. In this novel, much of what Faulks does buttresses my preconceptions. He describes a milieu that is familar to me in way that is hugely entertaining but hardly provocative. I do not know if Gabriel Northwood, the impoverished young barrister is based on someone that Faulks knows, but he is a convincing recreation of more than one lawyer that I knew when they were that age. Likewise, I know drudges who escape into complex virtual worlds. We can also guess at some of the identies of the more public characters and institutions: DJ Taylor (R Tranter), Private Eye (The Toad), Costa Coffee (Pizza Palace), Charan Gill & Shaheen Unis (combined in Farooq al-Rashid).

Inevitably, some elements of such a complex novel work better than others. The description of the infrastructure of sub-prime lending, hedge funds, and financial speculation is described lucidly and generates an engaging plot but John Veals, the banker who engineers all this is too thinly portrayed to have much reality. Conversely, Hassan al Rashid is drawn sympathetically with depth but the contradictions inherent in Islam are flatly unconvincing. For all its flaws, however, this is a thoroughly enjoyable novel filled with easter eggs. For me the defining moment in my reading was the point when the recurrent motif of the selfish cyclist becomes Chekov's gun. That kind of referential detail tells me enough about Faulks' commitment to this project to know that even if the reader realises only part of the work's richness that reader is enjoying a feast. ( )