Union Atlantic

Union Atlantic, by Adam Haslett, Tuskar Rock, RRP£12.99, 304 pages

In the 300-year history of the novel, one topic central to the way society functions has generated a notable absence of interest from novelists: banking. But in 2010, no serious attempt at a state-of-the-nation novel can hope to avoid the subject.

Adam Haslett’s debut novel tackles the topic head-on. The protagonist Doug Fanning is a wealthy and powerful banker at Union Atlantic, a fictional conglomerate based in Boston. At the start of the novel he has just moved into a new mansion he has built in Finden, a wealthy town in rural Massachusetts. “Buy me a plot of land, hire a contractor, and build me a casino of a house,” is the instruction he gives to his lawyer. Later in the novel, that metaphor comes back to haunt him.

Fanning’s principal antagonist is his neighbour, Charlotte Graves, a retired history teacher who objects to the destruction of a forest for Fanning’s “steroidal offence” of a house. As she becomes increasingly annoyed by the modern world, she decides to take on Fanning and confront him in court over a legal loophole, which may mean his claim to the land is fraudulent.

While this confrontation provides the spine of the novel, the meat of this book lies elsewhere. Haslett has set himself a far more ambitious goal than a mere old-versus-new, environmentalism-versus-consumerism conflict played out as a neighbourly dispute. This is a novel of ideas, the central one being nothing less than an attempt to elucidate and skewer the corrupt values that led to the credit crunch and subsequent recession.

Though the novel takes place mainly in 2002, with a prologue and a final chapter explicitly sandwiching the action between the two Gulf wars, this is very much a novel about now. Haslett’s combination of broad satire allied to razor sharp socio-political insight recalls Tom Wolfe in his pomp, with Fanning feeling very much like this decade’s Sherman McCoy. Union Atlantic is a far bleaker book, however, than Bonfire of the Vanities. Where McCoy’s shameless greed had a semi-endearing comic quality to it, Fanning is a dark soul, a hollow man whose greed almost brings down the bank for which he works.

His chief crime revolves around a Nick Leeson-type sub-plot, in which a trader under his direct command takes a futures position with the bank’s own money, gambling on a rise in the Nikkei. When the Nikkei falls, the bank finds itself exponentially exposed, a situation that only worsens as Fanning and his trader try to hide what is happening. Haslett uses the plotline expertly as a way to explore “the invisible architecture of confidence” on which the banking system is built. In demonstrating how and why this architecture is weaker than it appears, his theme could hardly be more timely.

With his pointed referencing of the two Gulf wars, Haslett is seeking a connection between greed, personal violence and military violence. Charlotte Graves’ hostility towards the generation moving into her newly prosperous town is pinned down to “the eyes of the wealthy young and the violence simmering numbly there”. A prologue shows Fanning running air defence on an American vessel in the Gulf in 1988. He is at the controls when a commercial jet is shot down after being mistaken for an assault aircraft. When he gets his job at Union Atlantic, he knows he has been hired as “an attractive weapon”.

Parallels between warfare and banking pepper the novel, most importantly in the two acts of havoc Fanning wreaks, destroying a plane and a bank. In both, he is a truly modern demon, in that he destroys lives without getting his hands dirty or even looking his victims in the eye.

Fanning ultimately bears a closer resemblance to Conrad’s Colonel Kurtz than to Wolfe’s McCoy. Union Atlantic sets itself the daunting challenge of doing for late capitalism what Heart of Darkness did for late colonialism. It is a measure of Haslett’s extraordinary skill that he just about succeeds.

William Sutcliffe is the author of ‘Whatever Makes You Happy’ (Bloomsbury)