Chapter 11 ‘Clearly Money Has Something to Do with Life’1 – But What Exactly? Reflections on Recent Credit Crunch Fiction(s)
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The role of money has been a topic of debate as long as human beings have made use of it. The Bible tells us that the ‘love of money is the root of all evil’ (1 Timothy 6: 10), Francis Bacon warns that ‘money is like muck, not good except it be spread’, while William M. Thackeray regards it as ‘a charming reconciler and peacemaker’. These few examples demonstrate not only our economic dependence on money, but also our ineluctable cultural need to make sense of the ways in which we use it. The focus of the paper is on the recent credit crunch (2008), the City of London’s international interrelations with it and its lasting repercussions, which have spawned a number of responses in Anglophone literature and culture. The central question, which most of these texts eventually address, is whether human beings exist for the economy or whether the economy – and what kind of economy? – exists for human beings. To this discussion the five novels portrayed in this paper have conspicuously contributed: Alex Preston’s This Bleeding City (2010), Justin Cartwright’s Other People’s Money (2011), Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December (2011), Robert Harris’s The Fear Index (2011) and John Lanchester’s Capital (2012).