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Saul Bellow once described the two very good novels that preceded his third and best, The Adventures of Augie March (1953), as his MA thesis (Dangling Man, 1944) and PhD (The Victim, 1947). Alexander Starritt’s third novel demands a similar reassessment of his career. On publication, The Beast (2017) and We Germans (2020) seemed the work of a writer already at the height of his powers, the first a razor-sharp satire on tabloid journalism, the second a powerful meditation on guilt and complicity in times of war. Yet Drayton and Mackenzie suggests he was just warming up.
The novel begins in 2004. James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie are in their final year at Oxford university and on very different paths. James is an “aloof, stand-offish, arrogant” workaholic on course for the highest grade in his year. Roland is “a good-time Charlie” who — in a very funny sequence — sacrifices his dissertation to fly to Japan and interview a member of the Yakuza crime syndicate.
We next meet the pair on results day. James, who has already begun a management consultancy job at McKinsey (which he hates), receives the news of his first without surprise. Meanwhile, Roland’s 2:2 (“It was like announcing he had erectile dysfunction”) is forcing him to radically rethink his future. Pinning his hopes on a Japanese exchange programme, he decides to teach English in India for a year until the programme reopens for applications.
Cut to two years later. Roland, who is just back from India and about to join McKinsey himself (he never did get round to that application), bumps into James in a London pub, explaining that he left teaching because it wasn’t “scalable”. This gives James an idea. On the verge of being fired from McKinsey for “not quite meshing”, he puts together a proposal to transform India’s education system that earns him his first management role and Roland a place on his team.
Then the 2008 financial crash happens. The India project axed, the pair go to Aberdeen to lay off hundreds of employees from a failing oil company. It is soul-crushing work — “sacking people, hating it, and unable to stop” — but it does bring them into the orbit of an enterprising tidal engineer. Impressed by his prototype, they buy it up, quit McKinsey and found Drayton-Mackenzie Ltd, a renewable energy start-up that aims to “alter the course of history by ending the need for oil and gas”.
The protagonists’ shared ambition is almost a match for the author’s. Spanning 17 years and some 500 pages, Drayton and Mackenzie is simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship. A novel has not done so much so well since Michael Chabon’s friendship epic, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000).
In one brilliantly tense scene, a diver with only so much oxygen in his tank has to dive to the bottom of the North Sea to connect the friends’ turbine to the seabed before the tide sweeps him away: “Soon he knew he must be almost at the bottom. He slowed and pointed his toes downward so his fins would touch first. Nothing. He sank lower. Still nothing. Where he expected solidity, only more descent. A tingle of vertigo. Being lost in a void.” In another scene, no less tense yet also profoundly sad, James and Roland come within weeks of bankruptcy, securing a last-minute investment that eases their stress but leaves them with what “almost felt like despair” at the hollowness of it all.
Starritt’s melding of fact and fiction — the Scottish-German author is also a journalist — is particularly impressive. In three sections that have nothing directly to do with James and Roland but have a great bearing on their lives, we are transported into the offices of the then-chair of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, as they make world-altering decisions in the midst and wake of the 2008 crash. Later, we get the first fictional representation of the Covid crisis that didn’t make me want to hurl the book across the room.
But the real delight of Drayton and Mackenzie is the relationship of its leads. This evolves as you’d expect — beginning in incomprehension and developing into something unbreakable — yet is so beautifully done, I’ll admit my vision wasn’t the clearest by the end. (Seriously, if you thought Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies was sad . . .) I don’t know how Starritt is going to top this one.
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt, Swift Press £16.99, 512 pages
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