Paul Murray: The Mark and the Void

‘They are expecting trouble?’ I ask.

Walter just grunts. He knows, of course; he has specialists in every conceivable field, but he still likes to canvass opinions from as wide a spectrum as possible before making a decision, in order, Ish says, to maximize the number of people he can yell at if something goes wrong. ‘Is there money in this fucker’s pocket, is what I’m asking you,’ he says.

‘It’s one of the biggest oil producers in the region. I imagine his credit is good,’ I say.

Walter scowls. I tell him I’ll look into it, and he signals his approval by changing the subject, launching into a familiar tirade about ‘regulations’.

When we are done, I return to my apartment, where I can finally start investigating the mysterious writer in earnest. Searching online, I discover that the novel he mentioned, For Love of a Clown , is real; an image search confirms, in a picture that shows him shaking hands with a giant papaya at something called the Donard Exotic Fruits and Book Festival, that its author and the man who approached me are one and the same. His Apeiron page has two customer write-ups, both negative: the first compares his clown-themed novel unfavourably to Bimal Banerjee’s The Clowns of Sorrow , and gives it a rating of two snakes and a cactus; the second offers no rating at all, and consists solely of the line ‘On no account should you lend money to this man.’ Beyond that, there is nothing. As far as the wider world is concerned, for the last seven years he might as well not have existed — which is consistent with what he told me about hitting a wall.

I go on to my balcony, try to look out with the eyes of a novelist. My apartment is in the International Financial Services Centre, a stone’s throw from the bank. The city centre lies upriver; if I lean over the rail, I can glimpse the Spire, jutting into the darkness like a radio transmitter from the heart of things, but it’s only on rare evenings, when the wind is blowing in a particular direction, that I hear its broadcasts — the whoops, the screams, the laughter and fights — and even then only faintly, like the revelry of ghosts. Usually, when night has fallen and only a few lights remain, chequering the dark slabs of the buildings, it is easy, looking over the deserted concourse, to believe the world has upped stakes and gone, followed the baton of trade west, leaving me here alone.

Before I came here I knew little about Dublin. I had an idea it was famous for its dead writers; I remembered the name of the river from arguments in school over whether it’s Liffey or Lethe the singer floats down in ‘How to Disappear Completely’. I entertained vague notions about Guinness and authenticity.

It turned out to be very different from what I expected. At university, I had read about the virtual , the simulated world that abuts and interpenetrates our own — ‘real without being actual, present without being there’, in the words of the philosopher François Texier. I didn’t think, after graduating, that I would require the concept again; I certainly never dreamed I’d find myself living in it.

That said, there is some argument as to whether the International Financial Services Centre is truly part of Dublin. It lies only a few minutes’ walk from O’Connell Street, but the locals don’t come here; many of them don’t even seem to know it exists, in spite of the torrents of capital that flow into it every year. It was built twenty years ago as a kind of pacemaker, an ingenious piece of financial and legal technology embedded in Dublin’s thousand-year-old body. A jumble of stumpy glass buildings, it stretches along the river like a pygmy Manhattan, on what used to be docklands. Its main function is to be a kind of legal elsewhere: multinationals send their profits here to avoid tax, banks conduct their more sensitive activities with the guarantee of a blind eye from the authorities. Many of the companies here have billions in assets but no employees; the foyer of Transaction House is crowded with brass nameplates, all leading to a single, permanently empty, office. They call this shadow-banking, and the IFSC is a shadow-place — an alibi that will say you are here when you are not, and cover your presence when you don’t want to be seen.

Could you really set a book in such a place? In a city that is not a city? Filled with people who are paid not to be themselves? He says he wants to find the humanity inside the machine, to track down the particular amid the golden abstractions; he says he can see something different about me, and standing on the balcony I thrill at the thought that I might see it too. But what if he’s wrong? What if he holds up the mirror, and nothing is there?

Jurgen shares none of my reservations. ‘An author?’ he exclaims, when I mention it casually after the Monday meeting. ‘A real-life author? And he wants to put you in his book?’

‘Yes,’ I say.

‘You?’ Kevin the trainee says.

I shrug. ‘It seems that I just … fit the bill, is that the phrase?’ (In fact I know perfectly well it is the phrase.)

‘Do you think he’ll put us in it as well?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I will ask him.’

‘Doesn’t it sound a bit weird?’ Ish is more circumspect. ‘Some bloke following you around, writing down everything you do?’

‘What’s weird is that it hasn’t happened before,’ Kevin says. ‘When you think about it, there ought to be a lot more novelists wanting to write books about banks.’

‘But he’s not planning to slag us off, is he?’ Ish says. ‘You know, say we’re all wankers and fat cats and so on.’

‘He told me it was going to be a balanced account of life in a modern investment bank,’ I tell her. ‘He said he wanted to find our hidden humanity.’

‘It is about time bankers were recognized by the art world,’ Jurgen says. ‘Given that we buy most of the actual art, it is frustrating to be continually misrepresented by it.’

‘So are you going to do it?’ Ish asks.

‘I haven’t decided,’ I say.

‘You have to do it!’ Kevin expostulates. ‘Tell him I’ll do it if you don’t want to.’

‘As your superior, I think you should do it, Claude,’ Jurgen agrees. ‘Though of course the final decision remains with you.’

He adds that, while I am making up my mind, he will ‘get the ball rolling’ by running it by the Chief Operating Officer; before I can protest, he has trundled away. Maybe Rachael will say no; I decide to put it out of my mind until I hear back.

I return to my desk, feel the familiar thrill in my viscera as I sit down in front of the terminal. Here is the market: the whole world represented in figures, a tesseract of pure information. The media like to portray bankers as motivated purely by greed, but this is not quite accurate. There are those who do it for the money, it’s true — who like miners or deep-sea divers bury themselves miles below the surface of things, far from the light and everything they love, in order to return laden down with riches. But there are others who do it for the god’s-eye view; those for whom the map has become the territory, for whom the market’s operations as represented on the screen appear more complex than life itself, deeper and more intricate, bringing their own vertiginous intelligence to the brute facts of the world in the same way that a painting of a landscape magnifies its beauty by placing in a frame of consciousness the thoughtless doings of nature. For these latter sort, the highs of the best drugs are shadows next to the exhilaration they get from the shifting fields of numbers: rice growers in Henan, car manufacturers in Düsseldorf, pharmaceutical research firms in Cork and Montevideo, condensed, compressed, interacting with each other in ways of which they themselves have no conception, like molecules hurtling and dancing and colliding under a microscope.