Many of you will be familiar with Tetsuya Ishikawa. He's the investment banker who, after a decade at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, got laid off and started writing for Cif, among other places. His pieces are often reasonable defences of the banking system that kept him and so many other bright young things in telephone number-sized salaries for so long. Yes, he says, people are angry at us – and rightly so – but in the end you lot need us, and the stuff we do. Polite, knowledgeable and well-reasoned, Tetsuya is the acceptable face of Master of the Universedom.
Trouble is, those admirable qualities don't always make for the best blogs. Nor are they essential to writing fiction. Yet that's precisely what Tetsuya has just done: written a novel, about the credit crunch.
That strikes me as a pretty major formatting problem. Of all the things you might want to read from an investment banker who had the proverbial ringside seat during the biggest boom and bust in human history, a novel probably isn't high up the list. An exposé, yes. A polemic, maybe. But a work of literature?
His publishers must have felt the same way. The book bears the confessional title How I Caused the Credit Crunch, and the subtitle: An insider's story of the financial meltdown. On the back, the blurb boasts of "a vivid and personal account of banking excess" and never once lets on that it is fictional. A casual reader might think they were buying a true story, another Liar's Poker perhaps.
And you would need to be a pretty casual reader to get through this book. The protagonist is an Oxford graduate called Andrew Dover who goes into banking (just like Tetusya) and fails to develop any actual characteristics. He is a cipher who wanders through the world of finance, sometimes selling toxic assets, sometimes hanging out with fund managers and other bankers and sometimes visiting lap-dancing bars. And throughout he remains as blank as a videogame character. We never get a sense of what he makes of any of this stuff or what motivates him (apart from money, that is). Dover's head is sent spinning after a boozy night out and a trip to a table-dancing club, and yet this 21-year-old, soft-headed graduate takes to the complex world of syndication of asset-backed securities with complete ease.
There are no real characters; just names. When the author wants to splash a bit of colour on his puppets, he does something does like this: "'This is not an option,' Juergen asserted Germanically." That's right: Juergen is German.
To be fair, Tetsuya never had aspirations to be a novelist. In his preface, he rather sweetly details how he began by writing a "very detailed, technically comprehensive and highly informative" book about investment banking that his mother could follow – only to realise it was literary roadkill. His friends advised him to put in all the sleazy bits – the bars, the strippers and the prostitutes – and the result is this banking-by-numbers collage of tittle-tattle and high finance. Yet so many other details of bank life aren't there. The ambient soundtrack of trading floors consists of swear words and bad jokes – yet this book is very light on both.
I rather wish he'd stuck to his guns, because the best bits in this novel are its descriptions of the syndication process, how banks came to focus more and more on spurious innovation and the uneasy relationship between investment bankers and their clients. That may make me a geek, but it's also where the book rang most true.
