Meltdown of the Irish economy in Eurozone

Paul Murray describes vividly in his third novel, the role of bankers in Ireland, who are classed as new class of pariah, accused for bringing the country to the edge of bankruptcy. And Dublin is branded as post-apocalyptic ghost town, full of protesters dressed as walking the dead Royal Irish Bank (Zombies), in unfinished luxury apartment blocks and city’s poor dispossessed grunting investors.

The exception is the local branch of the Bank of Torabundo, ( a big extinct volcano with extremely auspicious tax climate in the Pacific Ocean. Having survived the financial crash led by their CEO to avoid the toxic sub prime property market , who was sacked for being too cautious and replaced with the boss one of the biggest casualties of the crash and had to be bailed out.

The Mark and the Void is full of people desperately seeking to be creating their own reality, and Murray’ style to create character through dialogue and banking stereotypes who are both hilarious and awful.

Murray rescues to blame the Irish people for self-inflicting this financial situation on themselves.According to Murrays’s narrative not all bankers are bad, just as not all artists are virtuous.

As the Bank of Torabundo now called as ArgoBOT following the take-over of Agron a bust bank rises and then falls, staff hated by the outside world.

Oridnary people after taking professional advice, overstretched on mortgages and loans like every other person, and who are just powerless to control their own fate.

”We are like lepers out there” says one trader as his stressed bank goes south, “We’re like Greece”. Murray cleverly exposes the ponzi schemes and endless recapitalization of the failing institutions.

Yet all this plot of chaos, a tale of complex hard truth transpires with reliable humanity.

Murray’s placid novel set in Ireland during the financial crisis of bloom and bust, captures the post-Celtic Tiger recession, is boring but funny, didactic

Dubliner, Paul Murray is the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003, and Skippy Dies, which was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award in 2010 and (in the United States) the National Book Critics Circle Award.

 

THE MARK AND THE VOID By Paul Murray Hamish Hamilton £12.99 480 pages