Drayton and MacKenzie
It’s a mark of Starritt’s confidence that the quest to harness tidal power – the book’s main business – gets going only 200 pages in. We feel in safe hands from the start, reassured that he knows the story’s every last turn ... With a joyful knack for pithy analogy, the writing holds our attention as much as the events ... while there’s no shortage of chat about electrolysers and optimal blade rotation, Starritt keeps his focus on the human story of invention: dangling quietly over the action is the fact that James, lauded as a visionary, relies mostly for his ideas on other people. In the end, though, critique of disruptor-era genius is less important here than feeling and friendship.
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This is a big, bustling novel about love, friendship, money, ambition and the 21st century, packed with humour and intelligent observations ... Starritt is particularly good at capturing the millennial generation and its gripes ... Starritt’s depiction of the credit crunch elevates the novel to something more than a corporate Sally Rooney novel for boys ... This is an eyes-glinting, teeth-bared satire — of Oxbridge, of management consultancy, of tech bros and start-ups, of the British class system — but Starritt’s heartbreaking conclusion cuts through all that sarcasm and cleverness. I finished it tear-stained, feeling a bit hollowed out.
An example of a genre that has become vanishingly rare of late: the capacious, ambitious, politically engaged Bildungsroman ... At 500 pages, Drayton and Mackenzie can feel overlong. The passages dramatizing the American subprime crisis feel superfluous and intrusive. But Alexander Starritt can write as elegantly as Alan Hollinghurst and as fluently as Jonathan Coe. It is the prose that keeps us turning the pages of this epic novel of friendship and twenty-first-century life.
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