Starritt Drayton and Mackenzie

'An ode to the enduring power of male friendship' The Times Best Book of the Year
1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-80075-527-7
Verlag: Swift Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

'A big, bustling novel about love, friendship, money, ambition and the 21st century, packed with humour and intelligent observations ... I finished it tear-stained' Sunday Times 'Will have you hooked ... an ode to the enduring power of male friendship' The Times Best Summer Books 'My book of the summer' Janice Turner 'Thrilling' Guardian Longlistedfor the FT and Schroders Business Book of the Year 2025 For the first time since university, James and Roland's paths through life - one drawn in straight lines, the other squiggled and meandering - began to cross... James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he's still searching for a challenge worthy of his ambitions, one that will fulfil the destiny he thinks awaits him. Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with boundless enthusiasm but a knack for derailing his own attempts to get started in life. When a chance encounter in a pub reunites these old acquaintances, it sets them on an unpredictable course through the upheavals of the 21st century, and triggers an unlikely alliance. Against the backdrop of the financial crash and its aftermath, they strive to create something that outlasts them, something that will matter. Drayton and Mackenzie is a stunningly ambitious, immediately engaging and ultimately deeply moving novel both about trying to make your mark on the world, and about how a friendship might be the most important thing in life. THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED NOVEL FROM AN AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR CAN FRIENDSHIPS CHANGE THE WORLD?

Alexander Starritt's debut novel The Beast was a 2017 Spectator book of the year; his second novel, We Germans, was published in 2020 and translated into six languages. It won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in the United States, and was nominated for the Prix Femina, Prix Médicis and Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. Drayton and Mackenzie is his third. Starritt was born and brought up in Scotland, and now lives in London.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Starritt, Alexander

Leseproben

All his life, James had found things too easy. So far, he’d only really known one thing: the arbitrary, rule-bounded competition for grades. Before his A-levels, he trained with the total absorption of an elite athlete. In the maths papers, he even ratcheted the bar a few notches higher: the rules said you weren’t allowed to leave the exam room in the first twenty minutes, so he tried to finish by that mark. In the first of these maths papers, he reached his personal finish line with eighteen seconds to spare. There was a moment of exhilaration. But as the pleasure and tunnel vision of racing receded, he suddenly understood that he would now have to leave the exam room alone, while the rest of his class stayed inside together.

Each time he hit this mark in the subsequent exams, it made him sadder. At least after the summer there would be Oxford. The big league. He deferred the disappointment of the present by looking ahead. And he arrived there assuming he would have to sprint constantly just to keep up. But in tutorials he watched other students admit they hadn’t read “that particular chapter” or just look blank and terrified when the tutor was talking. Others confidently embarked on theories that quickly leaked and foundered, or they just kept clinging to the last idea they’d read about.

Practically no one, not even those struggling, seemed to simply put in the forty hours of weekly study that the tutors recommended. From the snatches of their conversation he overheard, they were using that time for club nights and sports matches. James couldn’t understand them. He found that forty hours was hardly enough to master the basics.

But most bemusing were those who seemed to intentionally trip themselves up – because it showed that they were a free spirit, or glamorously troubled, or too popular for secondary reading. They seemed to think it was interesting to be bad at things. They didn’t seem to understand that being bad at things was the default. Almost everyone since the dawn of time had been bad at almost everything. It was simply the world operating as expected. It was like if you let go of an object and all it did was drop inertly to the ground. Far more remarkable if, when you let go, it began to fly.

His tutorial partners found him aloof, stand-offish, arrogant. His tutors thought him enigmatic: usually a student this brilliant would eagerly accept their invitations to join the little informal gatherings they hosted with interesting alumni. James said he couldn’t spare the time from working. But surely – surely – that was a lie. Meanwhile, James lived in fear. Because the only students he knew were the handful that the timetable paired him with, it was entirely possible that in other tutorials there would be dozens of people far better than him. He studied like he had for A-levels, as if pursued by a rival who had no weaknesses and never tired.

The only extra-curricular activity he tried – just for the first term – was rowing, since it was a bona fide irreplicable Oxford experience and not, like the student newspapers and debating societies, just a sandpit version of real things for grown-ups. In later years, when he was the subject of articles and interviews, he was often asked whether it was true that one of the others in the boat with him was Roland Mackenzie. Yes, it was true. James didn’t notice him at the time.

Instead, he was thinking about undergrad essays, which he’d realised with a sense of disillusionment were merely a technique, a form to be learned like Shakespeare learned the sonnet. All you needed was three facts and confidence. Point, counterpoint, conclusion. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It was very Hegel. And once he saw this, he saw it everywhere: Parliament, the law courts, Newsnight. The two raucous sides of the House; the two sharply antagonistic barristers; prosecution, defence, judgment; one side, other side, vote.

He supposed he’d been naive to think of university as concerned with intellect. Maybe it was different at postgrad, but at this level, Oxford was just an elementary course in information-processing, a training school for Britain’s future lawyers, politicians and administrators. You skim-read the sources and hastily produced an opinionated synopsis. Of course, it made sense. Society needed administrators far more than what his tutor had called “a rare original response” to Spinoza. It didn’t occur to him that since he’d quickly learned the essay form, he could have tried to employ it for something with value of its own. He could only see the test and not what lay behind it.

In the end-of-year exams, he came first by miles, his result an outlier in the distribution, far above the girl in second. His beefy imagined opponent, up close, turned out to be stuffed with straw. It hurt so much he had to lie on the carpet of his childhood bedroom, gritting his teeth until it passed.

He fell into a lethargic slump. After the summer, his essays became perfunctory. His Comparative Government tutor asked if he was alright. He stayed in bed all morning eating Jaffa Cakes and reading sports biographies. So as not to have to keep renewing it, he stole from the library a life of the Czechoslovakian distance runner Emil Zátopek. At the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki, Zátopek won gold in the 5,000 metres, the 10,000 metres and the marathon – a feat unlikely ever to be equalled.

Zátopek had never run a marathon before and didn’t know how to pace himself, so he ran next to the world record holder, Jim Peters. After a pitilessly quick first nine miles in which Peters tried to break him, Zátopek turned to Peters and asked how the race was going. Peters, in astonishment, tried to trick Zátopek by saying the pace was too slow. Zátopek accelerated and was gone. Peters didn’t finish.

James loved that Zátopek had been born with less raw speed than his rivals. And he was born poor. So he worked harder than anyone before him had realised was humanly possible. He ran in snowstorms to toughen himself; he ran carrying his wife on his back. When his day job as a conscript in the Czechoslovakian army prevented him running his sets, he climbed the fence into Prague’s athletics stadium and ran at night. Performance-enhancing drugs were invented to let other athletes survive training like Zátopek.

There was a quote in the book from Christopher Chataway, an Olympian himself and one of Roger Bannister’s pace runners for the four-minute mile, who said, “For me and many others, it was simply more than we could stand.” Sometimes this floated up to James’s conscious mind when he was buying a sandwich or walking to the library – “simply more than we could stand” – and he smiled with joy. Imagine what Zátopek could have achieved if he’d been born with first-class talent and worked that hard.

He climbed out of his despond by imagining that he was competing not against the students around him but against the best student from every cohort back through Oxford’s nine centuries. No one could ever know how well he scored against them, but that only made the contest all the purer.

Then it was James’s final year. A job fair on a drizzly November afternoon. It was 2004, and the financial crisis hadn’t happened yet. Companies had come to offer a ladder up into the decision-making class, the top ten thousand who collectively made history rather than having it inflicted upon them. The talk among the students was about how much more competition there was than in their parents’ time. After the crisis, they would consider themselves lucky for having made this leap before it hit.

James went to the job fair expecting each recruiter to pitch the merits of Zátopekian devotion to his particular calling. He wanted to ask the civil servants how many years it took to become head of a proper department like the Treasury or the Foreign Office. And how would they compare the deep background power of the bureaucracy with the trivial attention-seeking but ultimate say-so of the politician? Was it better to be cabinet secretary for fifteen years or prime minister for five?

But the fair wasn’t like that. It was in a big bare room, like a school assembly hall, that was used for conferences. They’d set up two rows of desks facing each other to make an avenue of high-paying jobs. Each desk had company-branded pens and USB sticks. They had tall, free-standing posters, like Japanese battle flags, with pictures of smiling models pretending to be account managers and investment analysts. There were some noticeably less glossy stands for the graduate fast track at Tesco’s, the police and the NHS.

A hundred years earlier, the jobs might have been to administer part of a West African country or help run one of the great concerns – jute, shipbuilding – that catered to the Empire. But now most were for the professional services that since the 1980s had proliferated from the margins to the centre of the economy. Asset managers, consultants, lawyers, PR, a discreet caste of British men in blue suits, who, rather than attempt the risk, heartbreak and occasional glory of trade or industry, lived safe and comfortable on the steady flow of fees. For them, London was a kind of Switzerland, except with better restaurants.

The students meandered around these displays in sports kit or pyjamas. To James, it looked more like a Home Counties labour exchange than a search for vocation. He examined leaflets hamming up the exclusivity of joining the “Magic Circle” or the “Big Four”. The only one that appealed was a KPMG poster that exclaimed “Tax needn’t be taxing!” It had a picture of what looked like real accountants white-water...