Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Right, right,’ Paul says, frowning again and opening his red notebook to jot this down. ‘So you can’t go in there?’

‘From our side, no. The doors are locked. But I’m sure you can get clearance, if you are looking around only for your book.’

He asks me if I will make the arrangements. This turns out to be difficult, and not just for reasons of security. There is a strict hierarchy to investment banking, of which back office lies at the very bottom, below even lawyers. Suspecting, accurately, that the analysts and traders look down on them (just as the M&A bankers look down on us), back office are notoriously unsympathetic to requests for help. My banking career started in the back office, however, and this gives me a certain amount of currency among them. Eventually, Paul gets his tour.

When he returns, however, his mood seems even worse. He takes out his notebook and sits by the window, but he writes nothing, instead just stares balefully out over the river. Then, though it’s not even 4 p.m., he gets up and leaves. He doesn’t say goodbye.

That evening, the Minister gives a press conference to announce further exceptional liquidity assistance, that is to say, money, for Royal Irish Bank. On the TV screen, he has regained his air of command, though he grips the lectern with both hands, as if anticipating the torrent of fury that will come back at him; sitting on the dais behind him I spot the little sallow man, staring at the Minister as before, like some horror-movie psychic demonstrating mind control.

‘I don’t get it,’ Kevin says.

‘You’re not the only one.’ Since the news came out, the zombies have been beating a drum by the unfinished HQ, with motorists honking their horns in solidarity.

Not long after the announcement, we discover the reason for the Minister’s clandestine visit the previous week. He has commissioned BOT to write a special report on Royal Irish Bank.

‘Essentially, they are worried that more recapitalization will be needed,’ Jurgen says. ‘A lot of taxpayers’ money has been put into the bank. Now they are getting nervous that the bank’s executives have misrepresented its return to health.’

‘Fucking right,’ Ish says. ‘Talk about make-up on a corpse.’

‘They don’t have advisers already?’ I ask.

‘Up until last week they were being advised by Gerson Clay,’ Jurgen says. ‘However, as you are aware, Gerson have gone bust.’ He pauses to allow himself a brief moment of gloating. ‘I need hardly tell you that this is a highly prestigious commission.’

‘Good job, Claude!’ Ish ruffles my hair.

‘Is it going to be a lot of work?’ Kevin says.

‘Most of the work’ll be deciding how much we can get away with charging them,’ Ish says. ‘Poor old Minister, he hasn’t got a clue. If we told him to buy a really big mattress and stuff all the country’s money in it, he’d go and do it.’

‘We will not be advising the government to put the country’s money in a mattress,’ Jurgen says. ‘Rachael is keen that we find a positive angle. A way forward which will produce the most favourable outcomes for the major players.’

News of the government commission, as well as our rival Gerson Clay’s demise, buoys the whole office. I have my own reasons to be glad. Royal Irish was the centre of the great Ponzi scheme that was Ireland’s property market, with one hand doling out money to the developers who built the apartments, housing estates and mansions, and the other doling it out to the people who wanted to live there, neglecting, at every point, to establish whether anyone was in a position to pay it back. This report, directed right into the heart of the national folly, will surely give Paul what he needs to root his novel.

When the writer arrives at the office next morning, however, he is not alone. A man is with him: a great, hulking creature almost seven foot tall, with a sloping forehead and brawny, knotted forearms that extend from an ill-fitting nylon shirt. Paul introduces him as Igor Struma, poet, professor of contemporary art and member of the celebrated Vladivostok Circle.

‘He’s going to be helping me with some of the more conceptual stuff,’ Paul explains. What exactly this means I am not sure, but for the rest of the day, instead of observing me and my colleagues, the two of them spend their time muttering in secluded corners, or slinking around the office, making inscrutable gestures — knocking on walls, poking at ceiling tiles, tracing with their fingers mysterious vectors from the floor, behind computers, up to the power supply.

I have a bad feeling about this Igor. One cannot say what a poet ought to look like, of course, any more than one can say what a murderer ought to look like — but he definitely looks more like a murderer than a poet. He smells bad in several different ways at once, like curdled milk in a public lavatory, and when I type his name into the search engine, a red VIRUS WARNING!!! sign flashes up immediately on the screen, and a moment later a member of the IT team bursts into the office, demanding to know what I’ve done.

The others do not seem to share my reservations. Jurgen, on the contrary, is positively ecstatic. ‘ Two famous writers! We have almost enough to start the salon!’

‘But what is he doing here? Has anyone checked his credentials?’

‘Paul asked him to help out with the book,’ Ish says. ‘You said yourself he was having a few problems. This is a good sign. You don’t want him to pull the plug on the whole thing, do you?’

‘Of course not. I am just confused. If Paul is writing a book about me and my work here, why is he spending all his time with some poet?’

‘This is the artistic process,’ Jurgen says, with a shrug. ‘Who are we to question it?’

I do not want to obstruct the artistic process, but when I see Igor, under Paul’s supervision, making a gun-shape with his thumb and finger and boring an imaginary hole into the wall, it is hard not to think the novel is being dismantled before my very eyes.

Later that day, Paul invites me to the Ark for lunch, with his helpmeet nowhere to be seen. ‘I thought I should fill you in a little on Igor’s role,’ he says, as the waitress guides us to a table. ‘You’re probably wondering what he’s doing here. I’m writing the book, you’re the subject, what am I doing bringing a third party into it?’

I make a stock gesture of innocence, as if the thought had never crossed my mind.

‘The fact is that while the romantic image is of the writer working away in solitude, it’s often much more of a collaborative activity. Every writer has his strengths and weaknesses. It’s quite common to draft in a colleague to help out with elements you’re less sure about.’

I have heard about such practices in other art forms, but I confess that I had not encountered it in literature before.

‘It’s kind of a trade secret,’ Paul says.

‘Can you give me an example?’

‘An example … well, I suppose the most famous partnership would be J. R. R. Tolkien and Ian Fleming.’

‘Really?’

‘Oh yes. When Tolkien was putting Lord of the Rings together he was great at working out, you know, the ancestral backgrounds of the elves and so forth, but in terms of plot , he was hopeless. So he brought in someone who did know about plot: his old friend Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond. The whole magic-ring thing was Fleming’s idea. In the original version Tolkien was just going to have the hobbits and the elves reciting poems to each other.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I say.

‘Similarly Tolstoy, when he was writing War and Peace , found the Peace parts no problem, but he really got stuck when it came to War. So he got in touch with an up-and-coming young naval officer called Winston Churchill.’