Latest news with #AlexanderStarritt
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt review – a warmly comic saga of male friendship
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 Delivery charges may apply.
Irish Times
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt: A novel with impressive scope
Drayton and Mackenzie Author : Alexander Starritt ISBN-13 : 978-1800755260 Publisher : Swift Guideline Price : £16.99 Roland Mackenzie and James Drayton first meet at Oxford , where they row in the same boat. They don't become friends immediately. Roland is likable and boyish with an enormous lust for life (and lust in general). Instead of studying for his degree, he goes to Japan to meet the Yakuza, and ends up getting drunk every night in seedy Tokyo bars with a girl from his hostel. He graduates with a 2:2. James, on the other hand, comes top of his class. He's a whizz with no social skills, kind of like Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock : a dumb caricature of a genius. Drayton and Mackenzie is a novel with impressive scope, beginning in 2005 and ending in 2021, with an epilogue that jumps 20 years into the future. It follows the two boys' lives, which converge again years after university, in a chance encounter in a pub that eventually leads to the founding of a radical clean-energy company. Each chapter is drawn with amazing realism and detail. The dialogue is true to a large cast of different characters from different worlds. One of its most striking moments is a meeting with Peter Thiel in 2014. Starritt has an extraordinary ability to capture not only the texture of an individual life but also the underlying economic and political tremors that shape it across time. James and Roland are 'like marbles dropped onto a domed roof: they could have rolled in any direction, sent one way or another by the slightest dent or bobble in its surface'. Once they start rolling, they lose possibilities, and to gain them again would be 'to run against gravity'. READ MORE Halfway through the book, Roland turns to James. 'I don't want to be a downer, mate, but there is part of me that still thinks: there used to be all these different things – Japan, India, London, Aberdeen. Now it's just this one thing.' It's a feeling that runs through the novel, the sense that you end up on a path you didn't quite choose but can't escape from. The feeling is sometimes desolate and sometimes reverent. Starritt's achievement lies in making the sweep of history profoundly personal; Drayton and Mackenzie is the story of two men, but also of the era they inhabit.
Bloomberg
18-07-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Bring Back the Big Business Novel
Business is the great unmentionable in the contemporary literary world — rather like carnal relations in the Victorian era. Yet a tale of corporate drones turned green entrepreneurs is now garnering rave reviews. The Times's Janice Turner has chosen Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt as her novel of the summer. The Sunday Times reviewer, Laura Hackett, praised it as 'Dickens meets the Big Short' and confessed that 'I finished it tear-stained.' As for me, I could not put it down. The book tells the story of two Oxford contemporaries, James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie, who disappoint their parents by going into the business world. (For their generation, civilized people become academics or civil servants.) It also tells the story of two very different types of business.
