A Week in December

Sebastian Faulks

Average Rating 9/10 (1 Review)

London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.

With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life. Greed, the dehumanising effects of the electronic age and the fragmentation of society are some of the themes dealt with in this savagely humorous book. The writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it - and party on as though tomorrow is a dream.

Sebastian Faulks probes not only the self-deceptions of this intensely realised group of people, but their hopes and loves as well. As the novel moves to its gripping climax, they are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit.

'Page-turning portrait of noughties' London.'

'Faulks never writes a hackneyed or lazy sentence, polishing each with care'.'

Review by Ben Scott (310311) Rating (9/10)

Review by Ben Scott
Rating 9/10
I’m a simple man who likes simple things. I prefer a fried breakfast to hauté cuisine, a giant sculpture of a hand to the Mona Lisa and a blockbuster to an art house ‘classic’. This also applies to my books, I don’t like hugely complicated plot structures or overly confusing themes which have more prominence than the story itself. My pet hate is when authors decide to name characters with the same first letter; do they really have to be called Jo, Joe, James and Jamie? Authors often seem to forget that as much as we would like to, we do not often have the time to sit down and read a book in one sitting. When we come home, tired from a days work, we do not want to spend the first 10 minutes guiltily turning back through pages trying to remember if it was Jamie who was sleeping with Jo, or was it with James? Only to find out that it was actually with Jackie the jaunty and jocular janitor from Jersey.

This is why I picked up Faulks’s first offering of a novel set in modern times with a sense of trepidation. The story spans one week and narrates the lives of seven characters. Where the beauty of this piece lies is the masterly interweaving of the different lives. Sometimes this is obvious but more often than not it has a subtlety that makes you think to yourself; “Is that who I think that is? Noooo, really?” The characters come from a variety of backgrounds including a lonely tube driver, a schoolboy hooked on skunk, an elderly acrid book reviewer and most affectingly of all a student led astray by Islam. We are allowed a sneak peek into different aspects of each of their lives throughout the week as it builds towards its climax. Our student, full of conflicting desires, walks towards the centre of London armed with a bomb, whilst a hedge fund manager is sitting on the trigger of a much larger one.

It is a huge task undertaken by Faulks but one which he pulls off with aplomb. The fear is that with so much going on that characters would be under developed or that you would lose the thread of the action. However, you find yourself empathising with some of the characters and their hopes and fears mirror those of yours and mine. These are normal people and naturally you soon find yourself with a favourite, mine was Knocker and his fears over what to say when he met the Queen. We are also presented with the archetypal villain of our times in Veals, an insidious banker (best said with emphasis on the last two consonants) who is so far removed from morality as to be a true student of egoism. And if you do have a momentary lapse in your memory then there is a handy crib sheet towards the beginning in which most of them are invited to a dinner party. The action is easily followed as it is far from complex, however, some passages relating to Islam that Faulks uses takes some concentration. But that effort comes with a price as you often find the arguments put towards our misled student strangely rational, but with a conclusion that is far from that.

The book is not without its humour as well with biting satire throughout which genuinely made me laugh out loud. Its satirical moments do not detract from the over-arching story line though, simply woven into the fabric of it. It is not humours for humours sake, more humour because you’ve got to laugh along at the world Faulks sees, and you inhabit.
Overall I highly recommend this book, a real masterpiece of storytelling. It is a book that anyone can find something in it that they like, even a simple man like me.
Ben Scott (31st March 2011)