We all hate bankers, right? They pile up lucre for themselves, while letting the rest of us go to hell in a handcart. As one character in Paul Murray’s wonderfully inventive novel puts it, they are “a bunch of people with one character attribute between them: Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy, Mr Greedy and Mr Greedy”.Murray throws another accusation at the bankers: they are terrifically boring. The banks wreak havoc, but at the centre of this whirlwind are “guys in front of screens all day long, selling each other little bits of debt – it’s a whole different order of nothing”. If the banks are too big to fail, the bankers are too dull to depict.Yet Murray tells us a story about a financier. Claude is a grey figure: a French investment banker working in post-c
30 July 2015, The Tablet
The Mark and the Void
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