A Week in December
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- ISBN13: 9780385532914
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
From the leader of the bestselling Birdsong comes a powerful novel that melds the moral heft of Dickens and the scrupulous realism of Trollope with the satirical spirit of Tom Wolfe.
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 largest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with small 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 reality TV and genetically altered pot; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless additional lives together in a daily loop.
With daring skill and savage humor, A Week in December explores the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life; as the novel moves to its gripping climax, its characters are forced, one by one, to confront the right scenery of the world they—and we all—inhabit.
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A Week in December
By Sebastian Faulks
Published by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Reminiscent of Paul Haggis’ 2004 Crash, A Week in December is a dark, raw, voyeuristic glimpse into the interrelated lives of several Londoner’s during the course of one December week. With over seven main characters and copious minor, the storyline derives its momentum through bitty snippets of senseless survival wherein, Faulks details the mundane, the blameworthy and the misguided.
Faulks’ writing, while erudite, is both bitter and inordinately expansive. I must admit it took fantastic willpower to persist through each futile chapter and then only to end in disappointment. Unlike Crash, there was no purpose, no `ah-ha” moment that brought everything together in an instant of “universal understanding” or enlightenment. The tale simply ends lacking redemption, recognition or reproach.
If you’ve become complacent in your rose-colored-glasses and desire an unabashed dose of reality, this novel may be for you. If, on the additional hand, you are cognizant of the world in which you live everyday and desire a bit of hope, recognition and redemptive inspiration in your reading, I would advise you steer clear of this one.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
A lot is packed into A Week in December. High finance, terrorism, and even humor, all resulting in a highly entertaining and educational read. There is much about the inner workings of the stock market.
We have here a complex novel of contemporary London that leaves you wiser for having read it.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
A Week in December is a wonderfully introspective book that follows several characters through, as you might imagine, a week in December. Set in London, the major characters include a very shady hedge-fund manager, a young Muslim man, a Polish football star, a tube-train driver, and a barrister.
The focus of the book is on ‘real life’ vs. the escape that modern humans find in many sources of comfort or diversion, be it the internet, books, religion, or obsession with money. It is a very astute current commentary on the state of the world and where we may be heading. The pacing of the plot starts rather slowly with the introduction of the characters, but by mid-book I was reading as regularly as possible to find out what happens next.
The major problem with the book in my view, and what kept it from 5 stars, was the deeply detailed description of the hedge-fund manager’s manipulation of the market to further enrich himself at fantastic cost to others. This detail could probably have been kept to a minimum while still giving the all-purpose thought of what he was doing lacking disrupting the flow of the book. Financial types might delight in it but I reflect the average reader will find it cumbersome.
In synopsis, this is a very thoughtful book on the state of modern society. The pace suffers at times from the financial detail included, but even just reading to pick up new vocabulary words would be worth your time.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
A WEEK IN DECEMBER is a tour de force that offers both high entertainment and provocative thoughts. It is as fine a “just-published” novel as I have read in the past five years.
First the entertainment: The novel introduces a dozen or so principal characters (and another two dozen secondary ones) who are involved in four major inter-related tale lines (and another handful of secondary ones) that renovate and converge through one week in December — specifically, December 16 through December 22, 2008. The setting is contemporary, multi-cultural London (where now 75% of births are to mothers who were not born in the U.K.). The major tale lines are: a global financial coup fictitious to wrest billions of pounds for a hedge fund at the cost of a major U.K. bank and to the financial detriment of millions of pensioners, survival-level African agricultural workers, and (of course) taxpayers; an Islamic terrorist bombing plot; the descent into psychosis by the 16-year-ancient son of a billionaire supporter with ready access to £700 for genetically-altered marijuana; and an unlikely and touching romance. The narrative develops and interweaves these as well as the secondary tales very skillfully, making an ever-accelerating propulsion as the week unfolds and the tales head towards their dénouements. It all makes for a novel hard to place down.
Now for the thoughts: A WEEK IN DECEMBER explores such subjects as Islam and terrorism, the Alice-in-Wonderland world of high finance over the last thirty years with its exotic financial instruments and unbridled greed, the interpenetration of the virtual reality of the internet-world into the reality of “Right Life”, schizophrenia, the dumbing-down of education in the West, and the overall crassness and shallowness of “culture” in the U.K. (and that list constitutes just the tip of the iceberg).
For example, with regard to Islam, the most thoughtful of Faulks’s characters in the novel reflects as follows: “Once an early theological debate had chose for all time that the Koran was factually and in every syllable the unmediated word of God, then all Muslims became by definition `fundamentalist.’ It was by its scenery unlike Judaism or Christianity; it was intrinsically, and reasonably unapologetically, a fundamentalist religion. There was, of course, a world of difference between `fundamental’ and `militant’–let alone `aggressive’; but the intractable truth remained: that by being so pure, so high-minded and so uncompromising, Islam had limited the kind of believer it could aver.”
Another example, having to do with society’s approach to knowledge and education: “In premodern societies the aim of people was simply to preserve what had been learned, not to lose it.” But by the twentieth century, Western society, especially in Europe, had adopted the goal of universal education and a net gain of knowledge among all, from generation to generation. “And that’s now been abandoned as a goal. * * * From now on there’ll be a net loss of knowledge in Europe. The difference between a peasant community in fourteenth-century Iran and modern London, though, is that if with their meager resources the villagers occasionally slipped backward, it was not for lack of trying. But with us, here in England, it was a positive choice. We chose to know less.”
Reading A WEEK IN DECEMBER is virtually effortless. It is written with pace and interlaced with wit and compassion. Some of the characters are stereotypical in scenery, but that probably is the inevitable by-product of the mode of parody regularly at the forefront in the novel. I rather doubt that the novel will have the impact twenty years hence that it has now, so it probably cannot be classified as “fantastic literature”. But it is as entertaining and thought-provoking as I could expect from a very timely novel.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
While there are many, many characters in this very timely look at modern London (the modern world in all-purpose really, but with London as the example), to me there were only two main tensions in the novel: an imminent terrorist attack and a plotted financial maneuver. Both are introduced early on and are not resolved until the last pages of the book. The rest of the book is a glance in to the modern lives of sometimes-appealing-and-sometimes-not characters, many empty to some degree or another, but what kept me reading was the twin journeys of the terrorist and financial attackers. The ending itself is the most haunting I have read in a long time, and worth the read to get to it.
The whole book, for me, was about finding meaning in the emptiness of modern life. All the characters are either looking for meaning in a way, reacting to perceived meaninglessness, or reveling in the having no effect of it all. Reality TV, blogging, social networking sites like MySpace and Second Life, the ridiculously rich, and especially financial traders all take a hit in this book, or at least a smack. The stock market and persons who work in and around it come off the worst, and rightly so if there is any accuracy to Faulk’s portrayal of hedge fund managers, banks, etc. From listening to NPR and reading Matt Taibbi’s articles in Rolling Stone, I dread Faulks is right on about this stuff.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5