Overcompensated, corrupt and, since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, enticingly dangerous, bankers make the perfect baddies. Is it time we looked beyond the stereotypes?
Before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I used the business section of the newspaper to clean my windows. So it was quite a surprise to find that economics had grown as nailbiting as the Bourne trilogy, as apocalyptic as On the Beach. Recent non-fiction titles, such as Endgame by John Mauldin and Jonathan Tepper and Paper Money Collapse by Detlev Schlichter, are every bit as horrifying as grim dystopian classics such as Nineteen Eight-Four.
I have become at once fascinated and dismayed by the fiscal world and, in this, I have company. My new novel is an economic dystopia seen through the eyes of one American family. Joe McGuinness’s harrowing novel Carousel Court, due out in August, describes surreal neighbourhoods in California, where homeowners trapped in negative equity burn their furniture, kill their dogs, and camp out in tents in the front yard with shotguns. For an Irish version, try Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know (2012), about the crazed development binge when the whole country got caught up in buying and flipping properties – until the music stopped, and the Irish were left with dumpy pebbledashes and scrub farmland for which they’d paid astronomical prices with borrowed money. Kilroy’s protagonist is an alcoholic; by inference, the Celtic Tiger’s gorging on property was also an addiction.
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