This Bleeding City [Paperback]

I'm afraid I'm writing this review because I found this book appalling. I couldn't believe it made it past the editor.

I tracked it down because I'm a twentysomething who had the option to try for a job in the City, didn't, and still wonders 'What if...?' So the subject matter appealed to me.

But there are major issues with the characterisation and general writing of this book. I agree fully with another reviewer here, who pointed out that the characters just don't talk like real people do. Instead, every character launches into long, awkward monologues that sound more like stream-of-consciousness essays, all written by the same person. Almost nothing in the choice of words or sentences even reflects real-life dialogue. It's incredibly jarring, and makes it almost impossible to believe in any of the characters as being realistic.

Instead, it comes across like the author badly wants to make a story that's a cross between Wall Street and The Sorrows of Young Werther, but just doesn't have the ability. Whimsical, pseudo-poetic prose, lines like, "I splashed water on my face. There was something cinematic in my dripping gaze as I stared at the mirror." Really, something cinematic, *really*? That's as good as it gets throughout the whole novel- vague imagery and shallow allusions. The author's clearly got some dark feelings about working in the City, but they are clumsily pasted over the story.

Instead from start to finish, there's just this overall, constant tone of unchanging depression and terrible, entirely hollow profundity. First person narration can make a protagonist sound very bland, unless their motivations, feelings, and growth as a character are borne in mind. In this book, they are not. Alex the protagonist messes around at Edinburgh university where he apparently does nothing but live in a vaguely worded swirl of glamour and, um, like, you know, that stuff. He meets a token posh friend and an irritating, skinny, beautiful French girl who he falls in love with for being irritating, skinny, and beautiful. He's very serious and glum sounding. He goes to London with his two buddies and starts looking for a job. He's very serious and very glum sounding. So are his friends. He gets a job in an investment bank. He's very serious and glum sounding. He doesn't like his job. Neither do his friends. He realises actually while he was looking for a job was a really happy time, and all his friends agree. He gets some silly trader friends and goes to strip clubs. He's very serious and very glum sounding.

Nowhere do you actually get any sense of Alex feeling anything but this numb gloom. For example, he meets his silly trader friends and goes to strip clubs with them in a couple of pages, but he apparently has no feelings at all about them. He takes drugs even before he becomes a trader. Why? He never offers any opinion on them. He lusts after the irritating French girl for being beautiful, whimsical, and, I assume, for not judging negatively absolutely anything he does. (But she thinks he's beautiful, you see, so he must be beautiful on the inside too, right?). It's like reading the narration of a depressed robot. He is persuaded in one paragraph to snub the one interesting person he meets (a golden-hearted, hardworking young woman who sobs over her long hours and the charity work she does on the side, in the typical verbose speeches that this book is stuffed with) and does so. How does he feel about this? We're not told, he just does it.

The only saving grace for the book is that things don't magically turn out okay for Alex after he leaves the City, which would be the expected cliche. There are a few half-hearted conclusions about that maybe it doesn't matter what you do, since perhaps all jobs are boring? Perhaps the reader will enjoy chewing on that, or wondering perhaps if it maybe doesn't matter what Alex does, since perhaps he is incredibly boring and unconvincing. Otherwise, I would have to conclude that this is a boring story, with dreadful dialogue, about an uncreative, boring character who thinks he needs to be miserable and rich in order to keep his French girl.

The first few chapters of this book left me cold, and gave me the impression the author had attended to many creative writing courses. Tortuous metaphors and a strangely detached style. However, I stuck with it and as the book devlops I found the style suits the mood of the book perfectly, slightly wrong, slightly awkward and reflecting the odd personality of the main character. It subtly pulls you into his world.

Quite an enjoyable book in the end too. I'm not sure if the author was trying to give city types a sympathetic slant, but if he did he failed quite convincingly. The protaganist is a dislikable man, immature and clueless, and happy to work endlessly in the quest for money. His life gets more and more unhappy as he gets closer and closer to reaching his goal of being rich, and he fails again and again to see that what he really wants is in front of him. Lots of believable characters, and a good read.

I had avoided his book for a while. It seemed to be everywhere, and the Mariellas and Mark Lawsons were fawning over it, which usually means a novel short on plot and long on tricksy flourishes. I do think that publishers work against the long-term sustainability of their books with the breathless hype machines they employ. This Bleeding City is very clearly a first novel and positioning it as the next Great Gatsby was always going to cause it to suffer by comparison. Preston doesn't help himself by naming the main character after the hero of a Fitzgerald short story. Still, it was on 3 for 2 and so I thought I'd give it a whirl.
The opening is like something out of McEwan: intensely gripping and you are immediately thrust into the heart of the action. We then move back in time to when the protagonist, Charlie Wales, is at university. It is frustrating to have to work through this rather stale section of the novel as it picks up so strongly as soon as the action moves to London. I did find the scenes inside the hedge fund totally convincing and frankly terrifying. As one who lives a life about as far removed as you can imagine from this high-octane existence of big bucks and big egos, it was an extraordinary fly-on-the-wall experience.
The end of the book is extremely moving, although the emotional dial is set to eleven for a trifle too long. Overall, I would say that this is a fine first novel, old-fashioned in the best sense of the word and, indeed, almost as good as the nice people at Faber would have you believe.