Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt, Swift Press, £16.99

In Drayton and Mackenzie, his ambitious third novel, Alexander Starritt has accomplished something few, if any, of his millennial generation have even attempted. He has taken the Bildungsroman, the novel of intellectual formation, the journey from youth to maturity, and given it a new lease of life. He has done so by infusing it with elements of the European and American realist traditions, in which a whole era is held up to the light.

Yet the result is something else entirely: a novel of ideas that tells the story of a firm in gritty detail. What Starritt implies is that the ideas that count now are business ideas. Whatever alchemy may take place in the laboratory of science or humanity, it is only when the power of capital can be harnessed that the mind is able to take wing, to mould the affairs of men and women and lend meaning to their lives.

This focus on the literary potential of commerce was normal in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but has become rarer since. It evidently owes much to the author’s unusual career trajectory. Now 40, Starritt began life in the business world, as one of a team behind the policy platform Apolitical. By his early thirties, he was prosperous enough to become a professional writer. His first novel, The Beast (2017), was a latter-day Scoop, mocking the prejudices and pretensions of the tabloid press. Starritt was raised in Scotland but spent much of his youth staying with his German grandparents. This resulted in a second novel, We Germans (2020). This reminiscence of the last days of the Second World War depicted a soldier, based on his grandfather, coming to terms with the grim reality of what he and his comrades had experienced and done. It was a critical success and has been translated into German and other languages.

If We Germans was a picaresque tale, not much more than a novella, Drayton and Mackenzie is on an altogether bigger scale. The time-frame extends across the first two decades of this century, while the action moves from middle-class London to the wilds of Orkney, and from Tokyo to Silicon Valley. Occasionally, Starritt interpolates depictions of real people to mark turning points or to anchor the narrative in history. Thus, Ben Bernanke grapples with the financial crash; Mario Draghi saves the euro; Peter Thiel and Elon Musk make cameo appearances as potential investors. These scenes are deftly done, but they could have been omitted without loss.

James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie, Starritt’s two protagonists, are polar opposites. At Oxford, James is effortlessly successful, though his time there is solitary and joyless. Roland takes off on a jaunt to Japan to meet the head of a crime syndicate, has fun and ends up with a 2:2 degree. Despite the disparity in intellectual gifts, James gradually realises that Roland’s intuition and people-skills complement his maverick monomania. They both eventually join McKinsey and the author’s inside portrayal of management consultancy in its heyday is mercilessly accurate.

While dismantling an energy company in Scotland after the crash, James suddenly has a vision of how he might build a company on tidal power. Roland, despite his yearning to opt out of the rat race, is irresistibly drawn into James’ grand scheme and soon becomes indispensable. The hard graft of building a cutting-edge business in the globalised 21st century has never been better described than in Starritt’s granular yet gripping epic.

Although James and Roland are by no means physically attracted to each other, their relationship is more like a marriage than a business partnership. At a crucial juncture, when Roland needs to persuade Alan, a canny Scottish engineer, to join their still non-existent enterprise, he finds himself delivering what he realises is a ‘wedding speech’ about his oddbod friend. ‘On his gravestone it would say “He actually did it.” As in, loads of people say, “Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to start an energy company?” But his thing is that he really does it.’

A portrait of the human cost of entrepreneurship – its highs and lows, its triumphs and tragedies — emerges that is convincing enough to make us care about these two privileged and somewhat spoilt man-children. Both are indulged by devoted parents who let their sons live at home indefinitely but can, when required, provide ‘a few hundred thousand’ for a flat. Yet neither is driven by money: Roland is careless about it and James doesn’t know what to do with it.

James in particular is an example of the ‘worldly asceticism’ that Max Weber saw as the characteristic source of the Protestant work ethic. Roland draws inspiration, rather, from what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’, without which the rational calculus of capitalism doesn’t add up. Between them, they possess a complementary combination of brainpower and people skills that can withstand the fluctuations of fashion, fate and fortune.

The era that James and Roland inhabit already seems aeons away, before the world learned the hard way that peace and prosperity must be earned, not taken for granted by a global elite. Financial crisis, austerity and the rise of nationalism all figure in Starritt’s novel, but absent is the chronic uncertainty of our times. We look back on the epoch in which Drayton and Mackenzie is set and marvel at how little they knew that they lived in an age of plenty. Subsidies are easily accessible to those who know how to play the system, while investors follow the herd. The harder part is making the money work, not only for the individuals involved, but for the goal of renewable energy itself. From tides to electrolysis, from hydrogen to rockets, Starritt’s dynamic duo follow the elusive logic of the marketplace to the bitter end.

Although it is not a comic novel, there is a good deal of humour in this novel: from Oxford, when James directs the town’s tramps to a corporate reception for undergraduate high-fliers, to the scenes in his parents’ kitchen when the musicologist dad tries to come to terms with what his son is doing with his life and, defeated, takes refuge in cooking exotic Italian dishes. The women in the story provide comedy and humanity, too, but they are sisters, girlfriends, mothers and colleagues: this is very much a tale of male friendship and masculine obsession.

When I said that this was a novel of ideas, I didn’t mean the occasional glimpses of the author’s political beliefs — which one suspects are pretty much those of the protagonists. This is the world according to the Weekend section of the Financial Times. (Sure enough, Drayton and Mackenzie was longlisted for the FT Business Book of the Year — a rare distinction for a work of fiction.) Rather, what gives the novel its intellectual heft is the attempt to delve into what makes a young person acquire ambition. This is not straightforward at all: for the first half of the novel, Roland is constantly looking for an escape from the iron cage in which James has captured him. It is only by following the example of others that we learn to spread our wings. Yet human beings are motivated by the desire for fame far more than fortune. And it is only by the pursuit of ideas, often obscure ones, that the whole rich tapestry of human commerce and endeavour is conjured into existence.