It is not the extremists, though, who are the most disturbing characters in the novel. Most significant for Faulks is Hassan, a Scottish Muslim drawn into a radical Islamic group. We also meet the wife of an up-and-coming MP and a Polish footballer in the premiership adapting to a new life in London. Then there is Miranda who looks forward all day to logging onto her computer and entering into a world where she can take on the role of another character. There is a literary critic who corrects the spelling and grammar of the teachers at a leading public school and helps a pickle magnate prepare to receive an OBE. The city seems familiar, but readers should beware that Faulks’s latest novel will take them into the strangely unfamiliar and tensely political interior life of contemporary Britain.įaulks’s characters through whom London is described include Jenni Fortune, the tube driver coming to terms with a death on the tracks, and unsuccessful barrister Gabriel Northwood. From this public world, Faulks enters masterfully into the private experiences of individual Londoners and weaves together their daily lives. Then it sinks down to the Circle Line on the Underground where a tube driver watches passengers piling out of the train day after day onto the platform. The opening of the novel sweeps over the public life of the city of London: the construction site of Europe's biggest urban shopping centre, Arsenal playing Chelsea at the Emirates stadium and walkers with their dogs in Victoria Park.
Taking the lives of a group of London residents in the run up to Christmas, Faulks addresses issues in contemporary Britain from suicide bombing attempts to the financial crisis.
A Week in December attempts a similar project for more recent times. Sebastian Faulks rose to prominence in the early nineties with his novel Birdsong (1993), an exploration of the First World War in which he interrogated history through the detailed and rich lives of his characters.
0 kommentar(er)
