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Overview
What links the Investment Bank of Torabundo, www.myhotswaitress.com (yes, with an s, don't ask), an art heist, a novel called For the Love of a Clown, a six-year-old boy with the unfortunate name of Remington Steele, a lonely French banker, a tiny Pacific island, and a pest control business run by an ex-KGB agent?
The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray's madcap new novel of institutional folly, following the success of his wildly original breakout hit, Skippy Dies. While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul's fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But Paul's plan is not what it seems—and neither is Claude's employer, the Investment Bank of Torabundo, which swells through dodgy takeovers and derivatives trading until—well, you can probably guess how that shakes out.
The Mark and the Void is the funniest novel ever written about the recent financial crisis, and a stirring examination of the deceptions carried out in the names of art and commerce.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374712983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/20/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Sales rank: | 203,834 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College in Dublin and creative writing at the University of East Anglia. His first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. His second novel, Skippy Dies, was short-listed for a 2010 Costa Book Award and long-listed for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was ranked number three in Time's ten best books of 2010.
Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. He is the author of the novels An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was long-listed for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Mark and the Void (2015) was the joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was named one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year.
Read an Excerpt
The Mark and the Void
By Paul Murray
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2015 Paul MurrayAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-86547-755-1
CHAPTER 1
A Boat Ride
As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
Albert Camus
'Claude?'
'Yes?'
'What are you doing under your desk?'
'Me?'
'You're not hiding, are you?'
'Why would I be hiding?' I say. I wait a moment, hoping that this will satisfy her, but her feet remain where they are. 'I am looking for my stapler,' I add.
'Oh,' Ish says. On one ankle, between her patent-leather pumps and the hem of her skirt, I glimpse a slender chain from which several small animal charms dangle. Now a pair of brown brogues approaches over the fuzzy blue carpet tiles and comes to a halt beside Ish's pumps.
'What's happening?' I hear Jurgen say.
'Claude's looking for his stapler,' Ish says.
'Oh,' says Jurgen, and then, 'But here is his stapler, directly on the desk.'
'So it is,' Ish says. 'Claude, your stapler's right here on your desk!'
I clamber to my feet, and look down to where she is pointing. 'Ah!' I say, attempting to appear pleased and surprised.
'Are you coming for lunch?' Jurgen says. 'We are going to the hippie place.'
'I'm rather busy,' I say.
'It's Casual Day!' Ish exhorts me. 'You can't eat at your desk on Casual Day!'
'I have a meeting with Walter this afternoon.'
'Come on, Claude, you can't live on Carambars.' She grabs my arm and starts tugging me.
'All right, all right,' I say, reaching for my suit jacket, pretending not to notice the disapproving eye she casts over me as I put it on.
Ish studied anthropology back in Australia; Casual Day, one of the few rituals we have at Bank of Torabundo, is something she takes very seriously. For most of the staff a pair of well-pressed chinos and perhaps an undone top shirt-button will suffice, but Ish is wearing a low-cut top fringed with tassels, and a long, multicoloured skirt, also with tassels. She has even topped up her tan for the occasion, a deep greasy brown that makes it look like she has smeared her body with pâté. This image, when it occurs to me, immediately makes me nauseous, and as we descend in the lift my stomach dips and soars like a fairground ride. I dislike Casual Day at the best of times; today it spurs my paranoia to new and queasy heights.
'Is Kevin coming?' I say to distract myself.
'He went on ahead to try and get a table,' Ish says.
'This whole place goes mental on Casual Day,' Jurgen says.
At every floor the lift stops and we are joined by more people in pressed chinos with their top shirt-button undone, squeezing in beside us, sucking up the air. The crush makes my heart race: it's a relief to step through the double doors of Transaction House and into the fresh air – but only for a moment.
Pastel waves of identically clad bodies are converging on the plaza from every direction. I scan the approaching faces, the bland gazes that beat against mine. Amid all the smart-casualwear a figure in black should be easy to spot – but that means I too am an obvious target, and in a freezing flash I can picture him making his way through the sea of bodies, a cancerous cell swimming in the innocent blood.
'Thinking of getting a bidet,' Ish says.
'For the new apartment?' Jurgen says.
'Wasn't something I'd thought of initially, but the bloke from the showroom called up and said because I'm going for the full suite they can throw in a bidet for half price. The question is, do I want a bidet? You know, at this stage I've got my toilet routine pretty much worked out.'
'You do not want to feel like an alien in your own bathroom,' Jurgen agrees. 'I suppose Claude would be the expert. Claude, how much of a benefit do you think the addition of a bidet would be?'
'Do you think French people do nothing else but eat baguettes and sit on their bidets?' I snap. Out here I am finding it hard to hide my nerves.
Jurgen starts telling Ish about a special toilet he has had imported from Germany. I tune him out, return to my search. Above my head, monochrome birds wheel and swoop, like scraps torn from the overcast sky. How long has it been now? A week? Two? That's since I first became conscious of him, though when I think to before that, I seem to find him there too, posed unobtrusively at the back of my memories.
There's no discernible pattern to his appearances: he'll be here one day, somewhere else the next. In the gloom of morning, I might see him by the tram tracks as I make the brief, synaptic journey from my apartment building to the bank; later, bent over a pitchbook with Jurgen, I'll glance out the window and spot him seated on a bench, eating sunflower seeds from a packet. In the deli, in the bar – even at night, when I stand on my balcony and look out over the depopulated concourse – I will seem to glimpse him for an instant, his blank gaze the mirror image of my own.
The Ark is in sight now; inside, I can see the waitresses gliding back and forth, the customers eating, talking, toying with their phones. Of my pursuer there is no sign, yet with every step the dreadful certainty grows that he is in there. I stall, with a clammy mouth begin to mumble excuses, but too late, the door is opening and a figure coming straight for us –
'Full,' Kevin says.
'Balls,' Ish says.
'They're saying fifteen minutes,' Kevin says.
Jurgen looks at his watch. 'That would give us only twelve and a half minutes to eat.'
'Oh well,' I say, with a false sigh. 'I suppose we must go back to –'
'What about that new place?' Ish says, snapping her fingers. 'Over on the other side of the square? You'll like it, Claude, it's French.'
I shrug. So long as we are moving in the opposite direction to the Ark, I am happy.
The 'French place' is called Chomps Elysées. An image of the Eiffel Tower adorns the laminated sign, and on the walls inside are photographs of the Sacré-Cœur and the Moulin Rouge. Nothing about the menu seems especially Gallic; I order a mochaccino and something called a 'panini fromage', and while Kevin the trainee offers his thoughts on Ish's lavatorial options, I sit back in my seat and try to relax. Be reasonable, I tell myself: who would be interested in following you? Nobody, is the answer. Nobody outside my department even knows I exist.
This thought doesn't cheer me quite as I intend it to; and the panini fromage, when it comes, only makes matters worse. It is not that the cheese tastes bad exactly; rather, that it tastes of nothing. I don't think I have ever tasted nothing quite so strongly before. It's like eating a tiny black hole wrapped in an Italian sandwich. There is no way food this bad would ever be served in Paris, I think to myself, and experience a sudden stab of homesickness. How far I have come! How much I have left behind! And for what? Now with every chew I feel the emptiness rising inside, as if, like a kind of anti-madeleine, the panini were erasing my past before my very eyes – severing every tie, leaving me only this grey moment, tasting of nothing ...
I approach the counter. The waitress's scowl appears authentically Parisian, but her accent, when she speaks, denotes the more proactive hostility of the Slav.
'Yes?' she says, not pretending that my appearance has made her any less bored.
'I think there has been a mistake,' I say.
'Panini fromage,' she says. 'Is French cheese.'
'But it is not cheese,' I say. 'It's artificial.'
'Artificial?'
'Not real.' Prising apart the bread for her inspection, I point at the off-white slab sitting atop the melancholy lettuce. It resembles nothing so much as a blank piece of matter, featureless and opaque, before God's brush has painted it with the colour and shape of specificity. 'I am from France,' I tell her, as if this might clarify matters. 'And this is not French cheese.'
The girl looks at me with unconcealed contempt. You are not supposed to complain in restaurants like this one; you are not supposed to notice the food in restaurants like this one, any more than you notice the streets you hurry through, latte in hand, back to your computer. The screen, the phone, that disembodied world is the one we truly inhabit; the International Financial Services Centre is merely a frame for it, an outline, the equivalent of the chalk marks of a child's game on the pavement.
'You vant chench?' the girl taunts me. I raise my hands in surrender and, cheeks burning, turn away.
Only then do I realize the man in black is standing right behind me.
Around us, the café has returned to normal life; the sullen girl rings up another panini, the office workers drink their uniquely tailored coffees. I goggle at Ish at the nearby table, but she doesn't seem to notice – nor does anyone else, as if the stranger has cast some cloak of invisibility over us. Blinding white light pours through the open door; he gazes at me, his eyes a terrifying ice-blue.
'Claude,' he says. He knows my name, of course he does.
'What do you want from me?' I try to sound defiant, but my voice will not come in more than a whisper.
'Just to talk,' he says.
'You have the wrong man,' I say. 'I have not done anything.'
'That makes you the right man,' he says. A smile spreads slowly across his chops. 'That makes you exactly the right man.'
His name is Paul; he is a writer. 'I've been shadowing you for a project I'm working on. I had no idea you'd spotted me. I hope I didn't alarm you.'
'I was not alarmed,' I lie. 'Although these days one must be careful. There are a lot of people very angry at bankers.'
'Well, I can only apologize again. And lunch is definitely on me – ah, here we go.' The waitress appears, dark and genial as her counterpart in the fake French café was blonde and cold, and sets down two bowls of freshly made sorrel soup. We have crossed the plaza back to the Ark, and this time found a table.
'I can see why you like this place,' he says, dipping a hunk of bread into his soup. 'The food's fantastic. And I love all this nautical stuff,' nodding at the portholes, the great anchor by the door. 'It's like going on a boat ride.' He purses his lips and blows on the bread; he doesn't appear to be in any great hurry to tell me why we are here.
'So you are a writer,' I say. 'What kind of things do you write?'
'A few years back I wrote a novel,' he says, 'called For Love of a Clown.'
This prompts a faint ringing at the back of my mind – some kind of prize ...?
'You're thinking of The Clowns of Sorrow by Bimal Banerjee, which won the Raytheon. My novel came out around the same time, similar enough subject matter. It did all right, but when the time came to begin the next one, I found I'd hit a kind of wall. Started asking myself some really hard questions – what's the novel for, what place does it have in the modern world, all that. For a long time I was stuck, really and truly stuck. Then out of nowhere it came to me. Idea for a new book, the whole thing right there, like a baby left on the doorstep.'
'And what is it about?' I ask politely.
'What's it about?' Paul smiles. 'Well, it's about you, Claude. It's about you.'
I am too surprised to conceal it. 'Me?'
'I've been studying you and your daily routine for a number of weeks now. It seems to me that your life embodies certain values, certain fundamental features of our modern world. We're living in a time of great change, and a man like you is right at the coalface of that change.'
'I do not think my life would make a very interesting book,' I say. 'I feel I can speak with a certain amount of authority here.'
He laughs. 'Well, in a way that's the point. The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting – they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's – if you'll forgive my language – it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood – Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel – that's finished.'
'So you want to write a book that has no meaning,' I say.
'I want to write a book that isn't full of things that only ever happen in books,' he says. 'I want to write something that genuinely reflects how we live today. Real, actual life, not some ivory-tower palaver, not a whole load of literature. What's it like to be alive in the twenty-first century? Look at this place, for example.' He sweeps an arm at the window, the glass anonymity of the International Financial Services Centre. 'We're in the middle of Dublin, where Joyce set Ulysses. But it doesn't look like Dublin. We could be in London, or Frankfurt, or Kuala Lumpur. There are all these people, but nobody's speaking to each other, everyone's just looking at their phones. And that's what this place is for. It's a place for being somewhere else. Being here means not being here. And that's modern life.'
'I see,' I say, although I don't, quite.
'So the question is, how do you describe it? If James Joyce was writing Ulysses today, if he was writing not about some nineteenth-century backwater but about the capital of the most globalized country in the world – where would he begin? Who would his Bloom be? His Everyman?'
He looks at me pointedly, but it takes me a moment to realize the import of his words.
'You think I am an Everyman?'
He makes a hey presto gesture with his hands.
'But I'm not even Irish,' I protest. 'How can I be your typical Dubliner?'
He shakes his head vigorously. 'That's key. Like I said, somewhere else is what this place is all about. Think about it, in your work, you have colleagues from all over the place, right?'
'That's true.'
'And the cleaning staff are from all over the place, and the waitresses in this restaurant are from all over the place. Modern life is a centrifuge; it throws people in every direction. That's why you're so perfect for this book. The Everyman's uprooted, he's alone, he's separated from his friends and family. And the work that you do – you're a banker, isn't that so?'
'Yes, an analyst at Bank of Torabundo,' I say, before it occurs to me how strange it is that he knows this.
'Well.' He spreads his hands to signify self-evidence. 'I hardly need to say how representative that is. The story of the twenty-first century so far is the story of the banks. Look at the mess this country's in because of them.'
Ah. I begin to understand. 'So your book will be a kind of exposé.'
'No, no, no,' he says, waving his hands as if to dispel some evil-smelling smoke. 'I don't want to write a takedown. I'm not interested in demonizing an entire industry because of the actions of a minority. I want to get past the stereotypes, discover the humanity inside the corporate machine. I want to show what it's like to be a modern man. And this is where he lives, not on a fishing trawler, not in a coal mine, not on a ranch in Wyoming. This' – he gestures once again at the window, and we both turn in our seats to contemplate the reticular expanse of the Centre, the blank façades of the multinationals – 'is where modern life comes from. The feel of it, the look of it. Everything. What happens inside those buildings defines how we live our lives. Even if we only notice when it goes wrong. The banks are like the heart, the engine room, the world-within-the-world. The stuff that comes out of these places,' whirling a finger again at the Centre, 'the credit, the deals, that's what our reality is made of. So, with that in mind, can you think of a better subject for a book – than you?'
* * *
Essentially, he tells me, the process would be a more intensive version of what he has been doing already: following me around, observing at close quarters, focusing, as much as is possible, on my work for the bank.
'What would I have to do?'
'You wouldn't have to do anything,' Paul says. 'Just be yourself. Just be.' He glances at the bill, takes a note from his wallet and lays it on the plate. 'I don't expect you to make a decision like this on the spot. To lay yourself out for a perfect stranger – that's a big thing to ask. I wish I could say that you'd be handsomely rewarded, but right now all I can offer is the dubious honour of providing material for a book that might never get published.' He cracks a grin. 'Still, I bet the girls in the office'll be interested to find out you're a character in a work of fiction.'
'How do you mean?'
'Think about it – Heathcliff, Mr Darcy. Captain Ahab, even. Women go nuts for them.'
'Although those characters are imaginary,' I say slowly.
'Exactly. But you'll be real. Do you see? It's like you'll be getting the best of both worlds.'
As if to bear out his words, the beautiful dark-haired waitress flashes me a smile as she glides past.
My head is spinning, and it really is time for me to get back to the office. But there is still one question he has not answered. 'Why me? There are thirty thousand people working in the IFSC. Why did you choose me?'
'To be honest, that's what caught my eye initially,' he says.
'That? Oh.' I realize he's pointing at my jacket, which I am in the course of slipping back on.
'The black really stands out, especially with the tie. Most people here seem to go for grey. Must be a French thing, is it?'
Yes, I say, it's a French thing.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Mark and the Void by Paul Murray. Copyright © 2015 Paul Murray. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Idea for a Novel,
1: A Boat Ride,
2: In the Abyss,
3: Persona Ficta,
4: King Tide,
Acknowledgements,
A Note About the Author,
Also by Paul Murray,
Copyright,
