City Boy…Beer and Loathing in the Square Mile from Geraint Anderson

 

There's a whole clutch of books about the financial crisis and the fall from grace of drug-fuelled, misunderstood city boys and girls and this is probably the daddy of them of all, so if you are going to read any in this new genre, it might as well be this one.

Based on Anderson's The London Paper's column- although narrated by a fictional character clearly for legal reasons- it is essentially an autobiographical tale that takes you on a journey from his [we are assured] 'left-wing hippy days' of University, through the uber-capitalism experience of life as an analyst in Canary Wharf, and back again.

It has to be said there is something compelling about the story- a bit like rubber necking a motorway car crash- and it is written in an almost hypnotic, blokey style that despite your higher nagging sense of taste, keeps you reading until the end.

However that blokey style too often strays into the juvenile, which although no doubt an accurate voice of the type of people making millions in the City, relentlessly applied throughout a book is wearing, as are his quips, jokes and 'amusing' closing time sexist and racist observations which again, as he says, are clearly based on a reality he has stored up from years of a banal existence with the idiots who come out with this rubbish, but they come with such frequency [and often repetition] in the book, that they left this reader exasperated and close to just tossing the book away.

This is a shame because many people probably do just that and miss the overall message of the book, and the really good parts. When Anderson is describing 'sensibly' the machinations of The City and the origins of the recent crash, he is very, very good; lucid and rational in his explanations. Unfortunately though this is too often swamped by a rollercoaster of prose style that too often sinks into banality and a crudeness that isn't clever enough to be funny.

Having said that, if you key into the voice and shrug off the lows, it is more often than not an entertaining- and occasionally gripping- read and although it is difficult to feel sorry for the author at the end of it, I suspect that was not his aim.

There are more stylish and perhaps more emotionally affecting accounts of the self-destructive City lifestyle- Alex Preston's novel 'This Bleeding City' springs to mind- but for an account from the raw, blokeish coalface of The City, this may well be the only book you need to read in a growing library on the subject.

Imperial Bedrooms

 

I must admit I have grown into a firm appreciation of Brett Easton Ellis rather than being a rabid fan from the outset. I enjoyed the first couple of books in the 80s [Clay, the narrator in Imperial Bedrooms, is a character from Less Than Zero] although well written, were almost disposable in a yuppies 80s sort of way. It was American Psycho that finally got me hooked and that book remains one of the best [and most shocking] I’ve ever read.

Whatever, Imperial Bedrooms. This is a lot slimmer slice of ‘stream of consciousness’ story telling than those before in which there is in fact hardly any ‘story’ as such, but more of a snapshot of lifestyle anxiety in the neoliberal materialistic morass of the early 21^st century. Clay has returned to LA during a ‘break’ in his standard issue media career, although it’s not exactly clear how successful he’s been at it, although one suspects not very. Wealth has nonetheless still clung to him which is perhaps another salient indicator of the nature of our times. He is obviously close to a breakdown, filling a life he secretly acknowledges as being shallow with delusions of love and friendship fuelled by the usual drugs and drink. It culminates in the trademark BEE scene of sexual and narcotic debauchery which is probably less shocking now than it once was, but still efficiently does the job.

Imperial Bedrooms is little more than a novella and the criticism that it seems to have been rattled off quickly are understandable but I think this misses the mark; the prose is in fact deftly managed, experimental but not numbing and clearly has been carefully designed. It may seem like easy stream of consciousness stuff, but BEE’s talent is that he makes it look easy, when it is not at all.

In that way this book is perhaps closest to ‘The Informers’ in its atmosphere of materialist ennui and aimlessness, than any of its other predecessors.

This is a great book to lose yourself in for a few hours, to just let wash over you, and then allow its subtle messages to creep up on you. Although it is based on the monied ‘elite’ of a corporate America, BEE still has a strong message for our wider society in his analysis of that increasingly inept, corrupt, unimaginative but paradoxically continually enriched elite.

Finally, BEE is often described as the archetypal ‘post-modernist’ writer with his arch-irony and cynicism, but again this is a moniker that misses the mark to my mind. There is something stridently modernist in his work as he exposes the fundamental flaws in our consumerist, individual-obsessed western culture. He perhaps doesn’t meticulously pick it apart, or suggest any mechanisms for its amelioration as some modernist analysts do [of whom there are precious few of today anyway] but. as a novelist, he does do what a good novelist should do: he makes you think and then devise your own conclusions on what has been presented to you.