Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt review – a warmly comic saga of male friendship

The Guardian

3 days ago

Scottish-German author Alexander Starritt's debut, The Beast, followed a tabloid journalist; his second novel, We Germans, was about a Nazi. His new book gets us rooting for two wealthy management consultants fresh out of Oxford, both of them men (assuming you haven't already tuned out). I suspect his agent might have found it easier to pitch a novel about sex criminals, not least because Drayton and Mackenzie's approach is so unfashionably traditionalist: it's a chunky, warmly observed, 9/11-to-Covid saga that, while comic in tone and often extremely funny, doesn't labour under any obligation to send up its protagonists, still less take them down.
James Drayton, born to north London academics, is a socially awkward high achiever who privately measures himself against Christopher Columbus and Napoleon. Joining the McKinsey consultancy firm after coming top of his year in philosophy, politics and economics hasn't eased the pressure he has always felt to 'come up with something so brilliant it was irrefutable, like the obliterating ultra-white light of a nuclear bomb'.
The key to his sense of destiny arrives in the unlikely shape of a slacking junior colleague, Roland Mackenzie, who graduated with a 2:2 in physics (for James, a shame akin to 'admitting erectile dysfunction'). Mutual suspicion thaws when they're tasked with restructuring an Aberdeen oil firm in possession of the patents for a pioneering underwater turbine – tempting James and Roland to poach their star engineer, quit McKinsey and go it alone in green energy.
It's a mark of Starritt's confidence that the quest to harness tidal power – the book's main business – gets going only 200 pages in. We feel in safe hands from the start, reassured that he knows the story's every last turn ('In later years, when he was the subject of articles and interviews …' begins a line about James on the second page, his A-levels barely over). But we're kept on our toes: while the narration hews to the point of view of the central duo, it fills in the period backdrop – bailouts, Brexit – by dipping unpredictably into the perspective of real-life figures such as the Italian politician and former president of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi, seen delivering his famous 2012 speech vowing to save the euro 'whatever it takes'. As James and Roland jet around the world for venture capital, Starritt grants hefty speaking parts to PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and Elon Musk (is he allowed to do that?, I asked myself: always a sign of a writer up to something exciting).
The plot is crammed with curveballs for the plucky entrepreneurs, whether it's a shattered undersea cable, a coma caused by undiagnosed diabetes, or the dilemma that ensues when James and Roland fall for the same woman, having spent much of the novel joking uneasily about going to bed with each other. With a joyful knack for pithy analogy, the writing holds our attention as much as the events: the aforementioned relationship wrangle induces a 'low eczemal itch of guilt' in the eventual girlfriend-stealer, while new parents drive home from the maternity ward feeling 'like random civilians handed suits and guns and told to protect a miniature, defenceless president'.
There's pathos as well as laughter in the protagonists' beer-and-Champions League blokeishness, a way to keep unvoiced feeling at bay. When Roland, nearly 30, wistfully recalls a teenage holiday fling, he thinks that 'she was probably someone's mum by now', a line hinting at his deep-lying sense of stasis, even as the company's ambition grows: not just electricity, but rocket fuel.
Sign up to Bookmarks
Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you
after newsletter promotion
Because it concentrates on personalities rather than systems or ideas – not unlike Richard T Kelly's 2023 North Sea oil novel, The Black Eden – Drayton and Mackenzie probably won't be called 'cli-fi' in the way that the novels of Richard Powers are, but it's a reminder that science fiction isn't the only game in town in terms of writing about the environment and technology.
Yet while there's no shortage of chat about electrolysers and optimal blade rotation, Starritt keeps his focus on the human story of invention: dangling quietly over the action is the fact that James, lauded as a visionary, relies mostly for his ideas on other people. In the end, though, critique of disruptor-era genius is less important here than feeling and friendship; the winningly Edwardian, even Victorian, approach to storytelling extends right to the heart-swelling deathbed climax. It might have been subtitled A Love Story.
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt is published by Swift (£16.99). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.