Book review: The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers

Published on Friday 12 February 2010 18:15

The Hopeless Life of Charlie Summers by Paul Torday Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 282pp, £12.99

PAUL Torday was almost 60 when his first novel, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, was published and became an immediate success. This is his fourth one and it too deserves to do well. It is lightly and elegantly written, in a manner sadly uncommon today, somewhat reminiscent however of that fine novelist of the 1950s and 60s, Roger Longrigg. It is funny, touching, and ultimately surprising, for Torday successfully brings off a change of tone in the second half of the book; and this is something very difficult to achieve.

It is also timely. Its theme is credit and its easy availability in the boom years.

The narrator, Hector Chetwode- Talbot, known generally as Eck, is an ex-army officer who retired young from the service after an unsavoury incident in Afghanistan – actually before 9/11. He now works as a "greeter" or front of house for a hedge fund run by his old schooolfellow, Bilbo Mountwilliams. Eck doesn't really understand the business – it's not his sort of thing – but, fortunately, it seems, he doesn't have to. His job requires him to use his charm and connections to recruit clients or, if you prefer, to lure suckers into the fly-trap.

It will probably be obvious to the reader, long before Eck realises it himself, that there is something more than a bit dodgy about Bilbo and his company. Eck only begins to get worried when he is assigned to act as an ignorant middleman between Bilbo and a super-rich Afghan who may or may not be persuaded to invest his possibly tainted money in the firm. Meanwhile, more and more at a loss and experiencing prickings of doubt when he persuades one of his oldest friends to sign papers releasing a loan of 2 million to be invested in one of Bilbo's funds, Eck is engaged in an old-fashioned and honourable courtship of his cousin Harriet, whose fian was killed in Iraq.

What of Charlie Summers who features in the title? Charlie is dodging Customs & Excise when he first encounters Eck in the south of France, and Eck's companion remarks that they are so alike that they might be taken for brothers. Charlie is, as it were, the obverse of the coin in these years when money seems to grow on trees. Everyone else is making easy money, but not Charlie because all his schemes crash – to his mind because he lacks capital.

Charlie might be called a con-man, if it wasn't for the fact that with irrepressible optimism the only person he successfully cons is himself. In London Bilbo is siphoning off millions, while down in the West Country Charlie is busy trying to market what he describes as Japanese dog-food. The venture, hopeless from the start, collapses when he exhausts his meagre store of credit. In contrast, Bilbo floats for months and years on a sea of credit. Money, it seems, has lost all connection with reality, unless you are in Charlie's position when lack of it becomes all too painfully real.

Most of the novel is narrated by Eck, but the early Charlie passages are told in the third person. Such a division can be awkward and uncomfortable – as for example in Bleak House. It works well enough here because there are a couple of long evenings which Eck and Charlie pass together, and Charlie is only too willing to tell of his tribulations to anyone willing to lend a sympathetic ear. He is certainly a hopeless fellow but you can't help liking him, and eventually, in a climax which is improbable but nevertheless credible as written, admiring him too.

This is very much a novel for our times. It tells of a world in which "for a while it seemed as if the music would never stop ... Then, somewhere, someone, asked a new question. It was: 'Can I have my money back?' We didn't know it then, but the money that had come out of nowhere was about to return to the same place …"