Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘Claude,’ he says. He knows my name, of course he does.

‘What do you want from me?’ I try to sound defiant, but my voice will not come in more than a whisper.

‘Just to talk,’ he says.

‘You have the wrong man,’ I say. ‘I have not done anything.’

‘That makes you the right man,’ he says. A smile spreads slowly across his chops. ‘That makes you exactly the right man.’

His name is Paul; he is a writer. ‘I’ve been shadowing you for a project I’m working on. I had no idea you’d spotted me. I hope I didn’t alarm you.’

‘I was not alarmed,’ I lie. ‘Although these days one must be careful. There are a lot of people very angry at bankers.’

‘Well, I can only apologize again. And lunch is definitely on me — ah, here we go.’ The waitress appears, dark and genial as her counterpart in the fake French café was blonde and cold, and sets down two bowls of freshly made sorrel soup. We have crossed the plaza back to the Ark, and this time found a table.

‘I can see why you like this place,’ he says, dipping a hunk of bread into his soup. ‘The food’s fantastic. And I love all this nautical stuff,’ nodding at the portholes, the great anchor by the door. ‘It’s like going on a boat ride.’ He purses his lips and blows on the bread; he doesn’t appear to be in any great hurry to tell me why we are here.

‘So you are a writer,’ I say. ‘What kind of things do you write?’

‘A few years back I wrote a novel,’ he says, ‘called For Love of a Clown .’

This prompts a faint ringing at the back of my mind — some kind of prize … ?

‘You’re thinking of The Clowns of Sorrow by Bimal Banerjee, which won the Raytheon. My novel came out around the same time, similar enough subject matter. It did all right, but when the time came to begin the next one, I found I’d hit a kind of wall. Started asking myself some really hard questions — what’s the novel for , what place does it have in the modern world, all that. For a long time I was stuck, really and truly stuck. Then out of nowhere it came to me. Idea for a new book, the whole thing right there, like a baby left on the doorstep.’

‘And what is it about?’ I ask politely.

‘What’s it about?’ Paul smiles. ‘Well, it’s about you, Claude. It’s about you.’

I am too surprised to conceal it. ‘Me?’

‘I’ve been studying you and your daily routine for a number of weeks now. It seems to me that your life embodies certain values, certain fundamental features of our modern world. We’re living in a time of great change, and a man like you is right at the coalface of that change.’

‘I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,’ I say. ‘I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.’

He laughs. ‘Well, in a way that’s the point. The stories we read in books, what’s presented to us as being interesting — they have very little to do with real life as it’s lived today. I’m not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning , that’s the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you’ll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone’s constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it’s — if you’ll forgive my language — it’s bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that’s how they like it. They don’t transform, they don’t stop to smell the roses, they don’t sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood — Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren’t waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They’re not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel — that’s finished.’

‘So you want to write a book that has no meaning,’ I say.

‘I want to write a book that isn’t full of things that only ever happen in books,’ he says. ‘I want to write something that genuinely reflects how we live today. Real, actual life, not some ivory-tower palaver, not a whole load of literature . What’s it like to be alive in the twenty-first century? Look at this place, for example.’ He sweeps an arm at the window, the glass anonymity of the International Financial Services Centre. ‘We’re in the middle of Dublin, where Joyce set Ulysses . But it doesn’t look like Dublin. We could be in London, or Frankfurt, or Kuala Lumpur. There are all these people, but nobody’s speaking to each other, everyone’s just looking at their phones. And that’s what this place is for . It’s a place for being somewhere else. Being here means not being here. And that’s modern life.’

‘I see,’ I say, although I don’t, quite.

‘So the question is, how do you describe it? If James Joyce was writing Ulysses today, if he was writing not about some nineteenth-century backwater but about the capital of the most globalized country in the world — where would he begin? Who would his Bloom be? His Everyman?’

He looks at me pointedly, but it takes me a moment to realize the import of his words.

‘You think I am an Everyman?’

He makes a hey presto gesture with his hands.

‘But I’m not even Irish,’ I protest. ‘How can I be your typical Dubliner?’

He shakes his head vigorously. ‘That’s key. Like I said, somewhere else is what this place is all about. Think about it, in your work, you have colleagues from all over the place, right?’

‘That’s true.’

‘And the cleaning staff are from all over the place, and the waitresses in this restaurant are from all over the place. Modern life is a centrifuge; it throws people in every direction. That’s why you’re so perfect for this book. The Everyman’s uprooted, he’s alone, he’s separated from his friends and family. And the work that you do — you’re a banker, isn’t that so?’

‘Yes, an analyst at Bank of Torabundo,’ I say, before it occurs to me how strange it is that he knows this.

‘Well.’ He spreads his hands to signify self-evidence. ‘I hardly need to say how representative that is. The story of the twenty-first century so far is the story of the banks. Look at the mess this country’s in because of them.’

Ah. I begin to understand. ‘So your book will be a kind of exposé.’

‘No, no, no,’ he says, waving his hands as if to dispel some evil-smelling smoke. ‘I don’t want to write a takedown. I’m not interested in demonizing an entire industry because of the actions of a minority. I want to get past the stereotypes, discover the humanity inside the corporate machine. I want to show what it’s like to be a modern man. And this is where he lives, not on a fishing trawler, not in a coal mine, not on a ranch in Wyoming. This’ — he gestures once again at the window, and we both turn in our seats to contemplate the reticular expanse of the Centre, the blank façades of the multinationals —‘is where modern life comes from. The feel of it, the look of it. Everything. What happens inside those buildings defines how we live our lives. Even if we only notice when it goes wrong. The banks are like the heart, the engine room, the world-within-the-world. The stuff that comes out of these places,’ whirling a finger again at the Centre, ‘the credit, the deals, that’s what our reality is made of . So, with that in mind, can you think of a better subject for a book — than you?’