This tale of two entrepreneurs dips into the perspectives of real-life tech moguls, with thrilling results
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cottish-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.
