Emily Braunstein Brookes Risk, by CK Stead (MacLehose, 2012) 266 pp. $29.99
The back cover blurb for C.K. Stead’s latest novel, Risk, describes it as a ‘novel of our times’ and Stead, in his eightieth year, hits all of the major points of what has certainly been so far the most defining decade in a generation. The story begins in 2002, New York’s twin towers recently fallen, and proceeds to take in the likes of the invasion of Iraq and all of its messy consequences, the 7/7 bombings in London, and the assassination of Saddam Hussein.
Then of course there is the coming financial crisis. Risk’s protagonist, Sam Nola, is a middle-aged New Zealander who as the novel opens has, fresh from a divorce, recently moved to London, the city where he had a two-year OE in the late 70s. Sam is a commercial lawyer, and as soon as we discover that his return to London has brought with it a lucrative job in a fictional investment bank, the events of late 2008 loom large and ominous over the novel. There is some presaging element of fiddling while Rome burns about Risk, with banking bosses amassing more and more wealth and Sam rising almost accidentally up the ranks while being the only character to feel occasional anticipatory pangs of disquiet.
Stead gets the mechanics right, cutting his main character loose and plunking him in the hubristic, arrogantly optimistic environment that was London’s financial sector in 2002. He also gives Sam’s personal life a twist, presenting him with an adult daughter that he never knew he had, the offspring of an affair with a French woman when he was in London as a young man. As Sam receives huge yearly bonuses (‘Not enough?’ his boss asks when Sam expresses shock at £50,000) while weapons inspectors head into Baghdad, the reader sees the dark clouds gathering and awaits the inevitable storm to throw Sam and his comfortable life into disarray.
But the storm never quite arrives for him, and the book is worse off for it. We expect Sam to be a particular trope, the character who in having their life overturned by real historical events essentially stands in for humanity itself. This trope exists because it is such an effective way of assessing and contextualizing the past.
Sam’s life, however, seems charmed throughout the book. Things come very, very easily to him. He builds a relationship with his surprise daughter with seemingly no bouts of anger, doubt or even awkwardness; his long-term affair with a married woman is conducted entirely without self-reflection, jealousy or unease from either party; and for that matter women, from a distant cousin to a young engaged colleague to a Swedish prostitute to a famous London actress, are irresistibly drawn to a sexual charisma that isn’t quite obvious on the page. Plenty happens to Sam, certainly – Stead sends him all over the place, from London to Zagreb and then the Croatian coastal towns of Rijeka and Zadar, to New York, Oxford, Paris, Berlin, Stockholm and the South of France. He gets to know members of his father’s Croatian family, reconnects with his old French flame, meets a mysterious Hungarian man who may want to give Sam access to millions of dollars. His ex-wife shacks up with a former friend; people close to him die; his first grandchild is born. But while we know because Stead tells so us that Sam has emotional responses to these things, they don’t have any real effect in narrative terms. Instead of getting swept up and steered off course by the events around him, Sam remains calm, orderly and satisfied. He experiences no real angst, no real fear, no real regret. His life is one of easy resolutions and complacencies.
Take, for example, this reaction to not embarking on a potential love affair: ‘He reproached himself. But there was also a feeling of relief that he hadn’t embarrassed himself, or her, and that he was, after all, still more or less in charge of his own ship.’ Such a scene is typical of the novel’s frustrations – given a moment that is ripe with potential torment and drama, that could be used to move the character and story forward, Stead chooses to allow his protagonist to slip away unchallenged and unchanged. It’s the novelistic equivalent of introducing a gun in the first act: if a situation with strong potential for character development is introduced, it should be used to its potential.
Giving Sam a career in banking is another narrational red herring, thwarting our expectations. When the financial institution for which he works experiences its spectacular and inevitable disintegration, Sam is accepting to the point of being blasé. As the novel ends, Sam’s life is arguably better than when it began, which would be satisfying if he had overcome obstacles to get to that point, but in this case it is rather the result of what just happens to happen to him. Sam’s lucky, perhaps, which also means not particularly interesting as a character.
Happily for the reader, Sam has a number of people in his life who are less lucky than him. There are points at which the narrative switches to another’s point of view, though they are sporadic, and we yearn for more of them. The most frequent and intriguing of the non-Sam POVs is that of Tom. Tom is the stuff that strong central characters are made from: a reluctant trader who is nonetheless (and to his personal shame) rather attached to the lifestyle this career has afforded him, Tom writes poetry in the dead of night – gifting us, by the by, with the pleasure of original Stead poetry woven into the prose – and struggles to keep a grip on both his family and his health. He is challenged, conflicted and unpredictable. And just when we dare to hope that things might be going his way, the events of the times catch up with him, so that we are left wondering what the outcome will be.
Tom is no fluke. Risk is peppered with interesting (if lamentably peripheral) characters, the types that sour old friendships by debating the relative merits of the invasion of Iraq, that wrestle with addiction, that contemplate suicide. They question their life choices and struggle to find their place in the world – sometimes failing. One short, haunting passage imagines the final moments in the life of David Kelly, the whistle-blower who alerted the press to the ‘sexed up’ nature of Tony Blair’s Iraq dossier and whose subsequent unmasking and televised appearance before an aggressive select committee led to his suicide: ‘He felt weary, bitter, embarrassed, disillusioned – and beyond all of that, he felt something deep like grief,’ Stead writes. ‘He wished for unconsciousness. He was glad to be dying.’ Shortly after comes a scene conceiving of the moment when Tony Blair heard of Kelly’s death. ‘“Just write me a few words about Kelly,’” Stead imagines he may have said to Alistair Campbell (‘Al’). ‘“Nice and neutral, you know? We’d better sound as if we care.’”
That C.K. Stead is an outstanding technical writer goes almost without saying (‘almost’ because say it I shall in order to reaffirm it), and Risk is an undeniably readable novel. Stead’s economy of phrasing and clear, orderly syntax brings a narrative briskness that is immensely enjoyable and well suited to the novel’s setting. So firm and confident is the author’s grip on language that his repeated idiosyncrasies include a liberal approach to the passive voice that might make the blood of many an English teacher run cold, but here injects real buoyancy to the writing.
Moreover he knows that whereof he writes. Sam’s North London haunts and the towers of Canary Wharf where he spends his days are realistically evoked, and Stead equally captures Stockholm’s mix of freeze and coziness, the lavender scent that rolls off the hills of Provence, and the like, with the accuracy of someone who either knows these places well or whose meticulous research lends them the voice of a local inhabitant, rather than the air of a guidebook. The novel is rich with erudition, as characters exchange snatches of poetry or trill off bursts of opera at regular intervals; and Stead is able to describe the mechanics of what has led to the financial crisis so clearly that he could cause a financial journalist to blush.
But this is fundamentally what is wrong with Risk, too. Stead knows his subject matter and his control over the writing is unwavering. Yet that isn’t enough to give his book a solid emotional core, or to prompt readers to engage with or reflect upon the events within. A novel that captures its time cannot succeed on research and factual accuracy alone – as readers we require some sort of conduit to steer us through the story, to be touched and provoked as we may have been. We need, again, some representative figure to be buffeted about by the storm. These characters exist in Risk, but are too few and underused. Instead, Stead presents us with a leaden lead character who is outside of the storm, or in fact perhaps too squarely in the eye of it, calm and unaffected while chaos rages around him. Risk is an enjoyable enough book, but also curiously emotionally flat, ending up as a disservice to both its author’s innumerable talents and the rich potential of its setting.
EMILY BRAUNSTEIN BROOKES is a graduate of Victoria University of Wellington and a former editor of Salient. Her reviews have appeared in the Dominion Post, the Listener and the Times Literary Supplement. She currently lives and works in Paris.
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