The financial meltdown pays dividend in humour

South African author Justin Cartwright has written a book about the recession that is not only about more than money and misery, it’s also very funny

IT'S SAID that in times of recession, art and entertain- ment thrive; that people in need of escapism turn to film, music and books as a distraction from all the penury. And yet, mid-global recession, along comes Justin Cartwright with a novel, Other People's Money, about wealth, banking corruption and the decline of economic institutions. On paper, its premise might invoke an involuntary shudder, were it not for the fact that it also happens to be very funny.

Cartwright sips a macchiato amid the chatter and clinking of plates in a canteen. At 65, his skin is still delicate and home to the most unusually coloured eyes.

He wanted to write a state-of-the- nation work that would be about much more than money and misery. “This book is all about the effect of money – and in some cases, the lack of it – on people,” he says.

He was also aware of overloading the pages with number-crunching longueurs. “It’s funny, because there were war novels that were considered state-of-the-nation books, and if the Japanese were to write one now, it would be a dystopian novel. It just so happens that money and the economy is something everyone is preoccupied with at the moment.”

Characters who share those preoccupations include the Trevelyan-Tubal family, an autodidactic dynasty of bankers. The father, Harry, is dying a slow-puncture death, while his young actress wife Fleur recoils in the comfort of another city. Since Harry’s illness, son Julian is chairman of the 340-year-old family bank. A reluctant business- man from the off, Julian dabbles in a disastrous hedgefund and the bank is now in catastrophic trouble. His furtive plans involve trying to sell the business – but not before engaging in a dizzying amount of money swaps and trust-fund skimming.

Cartwright talks about bankers believing their own myths and of the industry’s innate sense of righteousness. “It’s like the army. Once you sign up for a career like this, you become gung-ho, almost because you have to be. It’s an occupational hazard, but it takes a lot of nerve to risk other people’s money. The myth is that the people who work there believe they’re actually contributing something to the world. They have this idea that they belong to an elite core who ‘understand’ the real world. Underneath the appearance of being a rational business dealing with ‘proper’ things – unlike art – it’s something that’s just as prone, if not worse, to absurd beliefs.”

The connection between art and commerce pervades the pages. The people with money are absorbed by it while taking it utterly for granted. Those without it, serve, act and make art. Fleur, Harry’s trophy wife, points out that bankers, “for all their taste and sophistication, never speak to their souls. They have taste, but cannot make art. They have wealth, but wealth has isolated them.”

Harry owns two Matisse paintings, which he is ambivalent about, but art, like most material things in the book, is valued only by the price tag. In one scene, a character collects a pair of handmade shoes that have a price tag of £4,000 (€4,573), a real life story borrowed from someone Cartwright knows.

“Harry is ambivalent to those paintings. Owning something, for rich people, is all about how well it reflects on you. As Fleur says, the family like art, but can’t make art. These people think they’re engaged and they acquire affectations, and I remember a story of a Canadian banker who was asked why he thought the banking system was so stable and he replied, ‘we didn’t go to the opera’. He was basically saying, ‘we just did banking, we weren’t the Medicis’. There’s this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can’t dabble in art – it’s a life. Being a writer, an artist . . . is a whole life.”

While the book hinges on one family’s monetary decline, there are several themes at work – class, Englishness, mortality. “It is about those things, but it’s also about the decline of certainty. Areas of consensus have shrunk about religion, patriotism, sexuality . . . so I thought that the crisis of morality in the City was an echo of the general sense of rudderlessness about ethics and standards.”

Much of the book’s humour lies with a character, Artair McLeod, an actor, “Celtic scholar” and poor dresser. He is writing a five- hour play about the life of Flann O’Brien and envisions that Daniel Day-Lewis will take the lead.

“I met Daniel once in Galway,” laughs Cartwright. “I didn’t tell him he was in the book, but I bet he knows by now. There’s a slight fairytale element to the end, and I thought Artair’s attempts to rope a premier actor of our generation into this rinkydink project was quite funny.”

Cartwright is a fan of Irish literature and chose Flann O’Brien because of O’Brien’s belief that characters “can take over a novel and shouldn’t be subject to an author’s whims”.

Cartwright read Dublinersat 17, admits he's read ("but not understood") Finnegans Wakeand loves Ulysses. Apart from writing novels and penning journalism, Cartwright has had a varied career. His first novel, Deep Six, was published in 1972, in the 1980s and early 1990s he worked in television, making films and directing party political broadcasts for Liberal party leader David Steel. Having grown up in South Africa, where his father worked as a newspaper editor, Cartwright says he "learnt that ideas had consequences".

At 20 he went to Oxford, and has lived in Britain ever since. Like Joyce, who he admires, does he feel that the distance has helped in writing about Englishness, almost an inverse of the exile’s eye? He cites his friend, the writer William Boyd, who was brought up in Africa, as an example. “He is someone who thinks of himself as having a slight distance, but I’ve always had a facility for understanding society. If I had been brought up in America, I think I would still have had the same sort of job as a writer.”

Other People's Moneyby Justin Cartwright is published by Bloomsbury