Money makes the world go round

   

    Don't you love a good name? How about Bilbo Mountwilliam and Hector Chetwode-Talbot? They both loom large in Paul Torday's new novel The Hopeless Life Of Charlie Summers, though the eponymous Charlie's name is rather more workaday than his ultimate fate might suggest.

     Hector, known as Eck, is a former soldier who has left the army with no particular career plan in mind, ending up working for his schoolmate Bilbo as an 'introducer' or client relations type in Bilbo's highly successful investment company. While golfing in France with his old friend Henry Newark, Eck encounters the rather shabby Charlie Summers, an unlikely entrepreneur selling Japanese dog food. A casual invitation to "look up" Henry at home in Gloucestershire leads Charlie to become curiously involved in Eck's life, a life which begins to go alarmingly off course when Eck's army experiences in Afghanistan are suddenly dangerously relevant to his current job, and the gathering financial storm threatens the solvency of Bilbo's firm and that of his many clients - the land-rich, cash-poor Henry among them.

     While Charlie is selling "downmarket dreams", Eck is "peddling the same at the upper end of the market", and becoming increasingly disillusioned with the job and suspicious of Bilbo's dealings. He looks for a way out, one which he hopes will feature his second-cousin Harriet of whom he says, touchingly, "Harriet had made my heart her own every time she glanced at me".

     Will Eck get his girl? Will Henry's now heavily mortgaged family estate remain intact? Will Charlie amount to more than "a trail of debts and damaged hopes"? Paul Torday tells all in a novel which is elegant, funny and highly readable. I enjoyed it very much indeed and found it reminiscent (though 'quieter' and more comfortably at ease) of the tone of Julian Fellowes' Past Imperfect, another book I strongly recommend.

Comments

[Literary Kitty]

Sounds interesting and rather original. I love the cover too!

[Simon (Savidge Reads)]

I do so want to read some Torday and have some of his books on the TBR (I also worked with his son last year - how random is that) this one sounds like a good read, I will pop the copies of his I do own up the TBR.

[Minnie]

Keep seeing his name & wondering, so very pleased to find your tantalising review. It sounds eerily similar to the earlier work of Simon Raven and Andrew Sinclair - the crust on its uppers (or not, as luck would have it).