Week in December (Faulks)

A Week in December
Sebastian Faulks, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
392 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385532914


Summary
London, the week before Christmas, 2007. Over seven days we follow the lives of seven major characters: a hedge fund manager trying to bring off the biggest trade of his career; a professional footballer recently arrived from Poland; a young lawyer with little work and too much time to speculate; a student who has been led astray by Islamist theory; a hack book-reviewer; a schoolboy hooked on skunk and reality TV; and a Tube train driver whose Circle Line train joins these and countless other lives together in a daily loop.

With daring skill, the novel pieces together the complex patterns and crossings of modern urban life. Greed, the dehumanising effects of the electronic age and the fragmentation of society are some of the themes dealt with in this savagely humorous book. The writing on the wall appears in letters ten feet high, but the characters refuse to see it—and party on as though tomorrow is a dream.

Sebastian Faulks probes not only the self-deceptions of this intensely realised group of people, but their hopes and loves as well. As the novel moves to its gripping climax, they are forced, one by one, to confront the true nature of the world they inhabit. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio 
• Birth—April 20, 1953
• Where—Donnington, in Berkshire, England, UK
• Education—Wellington College; Cambridge University
• Awards—Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature;
   Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• Currently—lives in London, England


Sebastian Faulks was born in Donnington, a village near Newbury in Berkshire on April 20, 1953. He was the younger son of Peter Faulks (1917-1998) and Pamela, nee Lawless (1923-2003). Peter Faulks was a partner in the local law firm Pitman and Bazett. He had interrupted his legal training in 1939 to enlist with the Duke of Wellington’s, a Yorkshire-based infantry regiment. He fought in Holland, France, North Africa, Italy, Palestine and Syria. He was awarded the Military Cross in Tunisia. He was wounded in North Africa and again when his company was in slit trenches at Anzio. He received further wounds when the Germans bombed the beachhead hospital while he was waiting to be evacuated. He made a full recovery and lived an active life, later sitting as a judge in London and Reading.

Pamela Faulks was the only daughter of Philip Lawless, MC, a sports reporter for The Morning Post and the Daily Telegraph, specialising in rugby and golf, which he played off a handicap of plus two. In 1945, he was reporting on the American advance into Germany across the Rhine at Remagem and was killed by enemy fire.

Faulks’s mother introduced her sons to books at a young age. She also took them to the theatre and to galleries in London. "She had the full classical canon on vinyl and we absorbed all that, though we were much keener on pop music," said Faulks. " 'Pick of the Pops' with Alan Freeman on Sunday afternoons was sacred. Later on, Edward had a rock band at school. My father was into books only, I think, not music so much—he liked Trollope, Waugh, Graham Greene. My mother knew all of Dickens backwards. Those characters were real people to her.’

Both brothers were educated at Elstree School near Reading. "It was a demanding and old-fashioned school, and we both had to rise to the challenge," said Faulks. "I liked it very much; it was a formidable education." Faulks went as top scholar to Wellington College in 1966 and in 1970 won an open exhibition to read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1974, and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2007.

In the year between school and university he had studied in Paris and learned to speak French. After university, he spent a year in Bristol, writing a novel. "From the age of about fourteen, I had made up my mind. I was inspired by Dickens and D.H.Lawrence among others. I set my heart on being a novelist at that young age." At the end of the year, he migrated to London where he found work teaching in a private school in Camden Town.

After two years, he got a job running a small book club called the New Fiction Society which had been set up by the Arts Council to stimulate sales of literary fiction. He took over from the novelist David Hughes, who became a lifelong friend. In 1979 Faulks joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph as the junior reporter on the diary column. "I was still writing books in the evening and at weekends," said Faulks, "but they weren’t much good." He had also been given work as freelance book reviewer, first at the Sunday Times, then at the Spectator and Books and Bookmen magazine.

He and Edward had been sharing a house, but went their different ways. "I bought a small flat in Notting Hill," said Faulks. "I had no television and I was meant to just write at night. Eventually, at about the fourth attempt I wrote something publishable. I rang up a publisher called James Michie. I didn’t really know how distinguished James was; he was just someone I’d met at a party. But I later found out he’d published Graham Greene and discovered Sylvia Plath. After some humming and hah-ing he accepted the book, which I called A Trick of the Light. I was twenty-nine. I got the news in a phone booth on Holborn Viaduct. It was a good moment; it felt like the beginning of something at last, after a long and occasionally dispiriting apprenticeship."

Faulks worked as a feature writer for the Sunday Telegraph from 1983 to 1986, when he went to join the Independent as Literary Editor. "In its early days the Independent was a great place to be. We had such a good football team, apart from anything else. We won the Fleet Street league in our first year by beating the Sun in the last match."

The Girl at the Lion d’Or came out in 1989 and, although described by one paper as "the most raved-about new novel for years," sales were modest and Faulks stayed with the Independent, becoming deputy editor of the Sunday paper when it launched in the same year. He left in 1991.

He subsequently wrote a monthly column for the Guardian, then for two years a weekly one in the Evening Standard and had a short spell as film reviewer for the Mail On Sunday. However, following the success of Birdsong, he has been able to focus his energies on books. "I haven’t had a proper job for years and would now be unemployable," he said in a 2005 interview.

In 1989, he married Veronica Youlten, formerly his assistant on the Independent books pages, later an editor at the Independent magazine. They have three children. They spent a year in south west France, near Agen, in 1995-96, while Faulks was writing Charlotte Gray, but have lived in London since then.

Sebastian Faulks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. The Tavistock Clinic in association with the University of East London awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the understanding of psychiatry in Human Traces. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
The novel is unequivocally successful [as a] narrative . . . Readers will race through the pages like banks through cash.
Guardian (UK)


The English writer Sebastian Faulks is one of those curious novelists whose predilection for well-told stories and popularity with readers often have seemed impediments to serious regard.
Los Angeles Times


A Week in December include[s] beautifully written riffs on how money really works... [it] is vigorous, authentic and often hilarious. The novel follows a hedge fund manager, a book critic, a subway ("tube" in British parlance) driver and a student who falls under the lethal spell of Islamic fundamentalism, among many others, but it is the hedge fund manager who resonates most. He is smart, ruthless, single-minded — and fascinating, in the way a shark or a serial killer can be fascinating.... Faulks [has] set a formidable standard ... clever and convincing, [it reminds] us that fiction always has the final word.
Chicago Tribune


With clever nods to Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Tom Wolfe, Faulks create[s] a rich, human novel of contemporary manners.... Despite [occasional] misteps, A Week in December is mostly a compelling and sympathetic critique of modern life.
Bookmarks Magazine


In London, three weeks before Christmas 2007, the lives of several characters intersect and intercut each other.... Faulks’ best plotlines are those that involve relationships between people. —Marta Segal Block
Booklist


(Starred review.) Two plots-one financial, the other terrorist-are being hatched, but there's much more going on in this absorbing big-canvas view of contemporary London from Faulks (Engleby, 2007, etc.). John Veals, a middle-aged hedge fund manager and the coldest of cold fish, is planning the collapse of a major British bank. His goal? To pump even more billions of dollars into his fund. Hassan al-Rashid, a young Muslim raised in Scotland, belongs to a jihadist cell. By chance, their schemes will climax simultaneously in December 2007. Faulks uses the tried-and-true countdown device as a backbeat. In the foreground is lucid if rather too lengthy exposition. To explain Veals's strategy, Faulks leads us through the labyrinth of puts, calls, trades and more, while for Hassan he limns a credible step-by-step recruitment process. As a counterweight to the blandishments of the Koran, Faulks offers the reader the rational humanism of Gabriel Northwood, an impoverished barrister; the strident voice of the Koran reminds Gabriel uncomfortably of the voices plaguing his schizophrenic brother Adam. Gabriel's somber hospital visits are a corrective to a shockingly cruel, hugely lucrative reality show that pillories the participants, all crazies. (Veals's teenage son, a fan of the show, will join Adam after a drug-induced psychotic episode.) The light in Gabriel's sad life is a new client, Jenni Fortune, the mixed-race driver of a subway train and devotee of video games. Unlike digital seductions (another Faulks theme), the love that grows between Gabriel and Jenni is piercingly real. For light relief, there's Hassan's wealthy businessman father, panicked before an audience with the Queen, soliciting advice on Great Books from an embittered reviewer, a veteran of the literary racket. Remarkably, Faulks retains control of his material as he shows us a world in which money rules, tunnel vision destroys and love remains the touchstone and redeemer. With its inexhaustible curiosity about the way the world works, this funny, exciting work is another milestone in a distinguished career.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions 
1. In the novel's opening scene, Gabriel prepares for two trials. One trial concerns the liability of Underground employees in a passenger's suicide attempt. The other involves a Muslim girl who was not allowed to wear her traditional attire to school. How do these cases set the tone for the novel? What do they say about London society in the twenty-first century?

2. Compared to the other characters, does Jenni Fortune have the best or the worst job? How does she balance tremendous responsibility with a lack of freedom on her mechanized route? How does her identity as Miranda Star measure up to her true-life persona?

3. Sebastian Faulks provides essential details about the novel's primary characters in the form of Sophie's list. What does this commentary indicate about the way Sophie perceives her husband's political circle, and her role in it? Is she naïve or perceptive?

4. What is the source of John Veals's appetite for total control? How does his life as a hedge-fund manager reward him in ways that extend well beyond money? How had your impression of John changed by the time you reached the book's final lines?

5. Why is religion closely linked to identity for Hassan but not so much for his parents? How do the jihadists define Hassan? Why is that definition appealing to him?

6. Ralph Tranter is one of the few characters who struggles financially. Is he in some ways happier than the others? If you could assign new salaries to some of the most memorable men and women in the book, how much would they earn? Who deserves to be rich? How do you personally define "rich"?

7. What does Finn need from his parents? Will Vanessa be able to heal him by herself? What was Finn hoping to experience with his purchase at the Garden of Remembrance: An escape? Or exhilaration?

8. What did it mean to Farook/Knocker to become an Officer of the Order of the British Empire? Was he selling out to an oppressor or simply reaping the rewards of life in a liberated country? What insecurities are evident as he preps for a chat about books?

9. What does Spike see in Olya that the other male characters don't? How is she able to blend erotic and wholesome qualities?

10. Do the women in the novel have an advantage over the men? What fears and temptations do the characters have in common, regardless of gender or social status?

11. What is the tipping point for this cast of characters in terms of morality? How do they distinguish corruption from purity?

12. Though the author reminds us that A Week in December is entirely a work of fiction, it illuminates reality in a new way. What does the novel say about reality television, virtual worlds, and other aspects of modern reality?

13. Did John's plan for Allied Royal Bank enlighten you about the global financial woes that have dominated headlines since 2007? How did the Information Age—with its rumor mills and day traders—make his plot possible? Would it be fair to call his actions a form of terrorism?

14. Love proves to be a powerful force in the closing chapters. What determines whether the novel's characters are "immune" to love or open to it (both in terms of romance and familial love)?

15. In what ways does A Week in December represent a departure for Sebastian Faulks? In what ways does it enhance the themes in his previous fiction?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)