Review: Capital Sins by Peter Cunningham
(New Island, €14.99)
We've been waiting for some time for a novel about the Celtic Tiger. Our best writers -- Banville, Toibin, O'Connor, Colum McCann -- have all been stuck in the past. But here at last is a novel that exposes what the boom did to us, the way we completely lost the run of ourselves as the property bubble made us (briefly) rich. It's all here, the corrupt nexus of politicians, developers and bankers, the greed, the vulgarity, the 4x4s and trophy homes, the drink, the drugs, the sex.
One can see why noelists have been slow to take this on. How do you encompass the excess of what actually happened, the financial intricacies and the consumer madness? The facts are stranger than anything a fiction writer could dream up. But somehow Cunningham has managed it, mainly by choosing a format which is half satirical novel, half thriller.
Given his background, he was the perfect author to take it on, a former accountant who went on to become a literary novelist (best known for the Monument trilogy) and a successful thriller writer under various pseudenoyms, who also tackled contemporary national themes, as in his thinly veiled portrait of Charlie Haughey in his novel The Taoiseach.
So, perhaps uniquely, he had the financial background, the literary skill and the thriller writer's sense of pace that were all required to turn the story of our boom and bust into fiction.
The novel begins in 2006, as the boom approaches the peak, and it continues for just over a year as everything starts to fall apart.
The central character is Albert Barr, a big developer who has gambled everything on a massive development called Goose Point, which is like a bigger version of the Glass Bottle site in Ringsend. It's so OTT it even has a zoo. His main backer is the HUBBI bank and its oily chairman, an operation that bears more than a passing resemblance to Anglo Irish. Then there is Barr's slightly mad but extremely sexy wife Medb-Marie, and her father who happens to be a government minister.
The portrayal of Barr, a man of gargantuan appetite of all kinds who knows he is overdoing it but can't stop, is completely believable, as are his desperate attempts to keep the house of cards from collapsing as unexpected problems emerge.
The description of his lifestyle and his relationship with Medb-Marie are at once hilarious and a little nauseating, although it's hard not to like him because he is slightly removed from it all, almost unable to believe how far he has come.
Even as he wallows, he sees through the excess, back to the ordinary childhood in Tramore.
Far from likeable are the HUBBI chairman Tand his senior executives. One suspects that their behaviour may be only a slight exaggeration of what was going on in the Anglo HQ on Stephen's Green. Some of the dialogue in the bank boardroom is too simplistic (presumably to explain things to the rest of us) but even so it's an insight into what it must have been like in such places at that extraordinary time.
The other main character is Lee Carew, a journalist who works for a tabloid paper and who stumbles on something that could jeopardise the whole Goose Point project.
Again, the portrayal of Lee's editor and of the newspaper office are way over the top. But as the storyline becomes more bizarre and the pace more frenetic, it all becomes almost believable. Or as believable as a satirical novel-cum-thriller should be.
Along the way the minor characters and the crazy atmosphere of boom time Dublin complete the picture. Cunningham wrong foots the reader a couple of times before the story comes to a shocking climax and a neat conclusion.
Full of savage humour and withering observation, Capital Sins is a compelling novel which is paced to read like Grisham but written with enough literary flair to lift it far beyond the usual thriller.
This is what riding the Tiger was like (and there's lots of riding in this story). It's the way it was, in all its obscene glory.
Irish Independent
