An attempt at the sort of 'politics intertwining with personal lives' novels that Jonathan Coe excels at, only rubbish.
Anyway, to summarize: 6 students share a house together, in the early 90s. Despite having absolutely nothing whatsoever in common, they are still best friends 20 years later, by which time by an amazing coincidence they've all become extremely successful in areas that make them especially vulnerable to the late noughties financial crisis. (This latter also being a bit hard to believe, as judging by the conversations they have with each other, none of 'em seem to have that much going on upstairs)
So, after Ben's introduced a few subsidiary characters who conveniently explain the financial crisis in terms a five year old could grasp, we have 500 pages of dull, one dimensional caricatures of what are already caricatured media 'types'(A yuppie trader, a tory banker, a Blairite MP, a postmodernist architect and a Nigela-Lawson stylee foodie guru) sitting around their Notting Hill gaffs having banal and tedious conversations which serve to only exposite Ben's banal and tedious insights into noughties culture: The problem here is that, one guesses, that Elton intention to satirise these sort of lifestyles,but seems to think that merely describing them qualifies as that. So the Nigella Lawson character 'has a range of sandwiches in Marks nd Spencer' From which I suppose we're supposed to deduce...what, exactly?
Terrible.
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