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Where’s the Dickens for Our Times?

Financial excess is an old theme of literature. Shakespeare dealt with it in The Merchant of Venice, and it evencrops up in The Canterbury Tales. Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, featuring the fraudulent financier Augustus Melmotte, is perhaps the most famous 19th-century dissection of corruption and greed, while the capitalist frenzy that gripped early 20th-century America was chronicled by, among others, Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser. More recently, Eighties excess was immortalised in several big, testosterone-fuelled novels, most notably Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, Jay McInnerny’s Brightness Falls and Martin Amis’s Money.

It seems odd, then, that the financial haymaking that has been going on in recent times has largely escaped the attention of writers. The wealth accumulation of the past few years has been considerably more spectacular than that of any previous era, yet the 21st-century Masters of the Universe have remained stubbornly absent from fiction.

There have been no memorable portrayals of oligarchs or hedge fund managers, no bracing satires set in the world of private equity. That other big topic of our age, the War on Terror, has had its share of chroniclers, but the misdeeds of financiers have -- so far -- been overlooked.

This absence is not confined to novels. The last famous film about banking was Wall Street, with Michael Douglas playing Gordon (‘Greed is good’) Gecko -- and that was in 1987. Television drama has taken us behind the scenes of professions from lawyers and doctors to teachers and politicos, but there has been no This Life for bankers, no ER of the hedge fund world. Theatre has become much more politically engaged, taking on all manner of high level corruption and malfeasance, but though it has exposed the rottenness o Westminster, it has not dealt with the rottenness of the Square Mile.

What accounts for this? The most obvious answer is that modern finance is so mind-bogglingly complex that few writers feel equipped to tackle it. What lawyers and doctors get up to is broadly known and has a basic drama we can all relate to. (Will the criminal be convicted? Will the patient live?) But few of us can understand, let alone sympathise with, the issues that cause bankers to break out in sweats.

The drama surrounding a fine adjustment in the value of a derivative, or a 10-point fall in the Dow Jones, is not something that can be easily captured on the page.

Yet although the minutiae of bankers’ working lives have become unapproachably obscure, what they get up to in their leisure time should be, from a novelist’s point of view, entirely accessible The lives of the super-rich are not sealed off from view; they are part of the spectacle of our times, the cultural fabric of life in the early 21st century. We know about the £30,000 lunches at Mayfair restaurants, the millions spent on Warhols and Hirsts at auction. We know about the private jets, the villas, the trips to Spearmint Rhino. People are immensely curious about these things, as is demonstrated by the success of banking memoirs, from Liar’s Poker to City Boy. If nothing else, it shows a depressing lack of commercial enterprise on the part of our novelists that so few of them have attempted to capitalise on this interest.

No doubt part of the problem is that, in Britain, there is a long-standing aversion to writing about business. More than a century ago, Henry James decreed that novels should focus on private life and the emotions, not politics and business; most writers since have taken him at his word. With a few honourable exceptions, such as David Lodge in Nice Work and Julian Barnes in England, contemporary British writers have steered clear of business.

This is not a problem that has afflicted their American counterparts.

Perhaps because US writers are generally more ambitious, and also because US culture is less sniffy about moneymaking, modern American novelists seem at home in the world of work and money in a way that few British ones do. Think of Saul Bellow’s comi-tragic portrait of errant market speculation in Seize the Day, or Philip Roth’s account of factory life in American Pastoral. Or think of David Foster Wallace’s sinister vision of a corporatised America of the future in his 1996 epic Infinite Jest.

We should not be surprised, then, that it is an American writer who has been most prescient about the current financial upheavals. In his slim 2003 novel Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo tracked the life of an enormously wealthy currency trader on a day of global financial meltdown. It is by no means DeLillo’s best work, but many things about it that now seem prophetic — the way, for instance, he captures the trader’s overweening ambition and arrogance, and how he evokes the sense of a system that no one fully understands spinning rapidly out of control. These are hugely rich themes for a novelist — think of what Kafka, or even Dickens, would have done with them — and they are certainly deserving of further literary outings. Perhaps one of the many bankers now with time on their hands will manage to do them justice.

William Skidelsky is books editor of the 
Observer