Other People's Money

November 29, 2010
In this mundane take on life in the era of global financial crisis, Cartwright (In Every Face I Meet) focuses on British bankers behaving somewhat badly, and the repercussions that ripple through one prominent family, and society more broadly. Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal is the aged patriarch of Tubal and Co., a privately held bank synonymous with respectability and exclusivity. In poor health, Harry is ensconced in Provence while his son, Julian, handles the business, where, thanks to some unwise dallying with complex financial instruments, things are looking bleak. As Julian engages in backroom maneuvers to shore up the bank, theater producer and playwright Artair MacCleod stops receiving his quarterly stipend from the Tubal family trust that he was granted during his long-ago divorce from Harry's current wife. This failure of payment proves significant when it becomes known to an ambitious young journalist who takes an interest in MacCleod's situation. Cartwright is intent on compassionately portraying regular folks as well as those who operate the levers of power—the bankers are indeed his most convincing characters—but the overall chilly, deflated feeling does few favors for a book that intends to humanize grand contemporary ills.

Starred review from February 15, 2011
From South African/British novelist Cartwright (To Heaven by Water, 2009, etc.), a winner of the Whitbread Award and Hawthornden Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, a tale half comic and half cautionary—and all compelling—about the financial crisis.

Tubal and Co. is a small, ancient private bank in London, and its longtime chief, Sir Harry Trevelyan-Tubal, has drafted his younger son Julian into the business and then retired to Antibes, where he's been overtaken by senility. Meanwhile, Julian has fallen for the siren song of "risk-free" derivatives, and the bank's hedge fund is awash in toxic assets—now toxic liabilities. Julian pumps into the bank as much family money as he can, and some backers' capital as well, to prop up the balance sheet while he courts a buyer, a blunt-talking, rough-edged Chicagoan named Cy (and a rare dip for Cartwright into cliché). Meanwhile, Artair MacCleod, a septuagenarian actor-manager who's fallen far, from Shakespeare in London to living in a Cornish boathouse and directing primary-school productions of The Wind in the Willows, finds himself suddenly cut off from his usual means of support. He was married to Sir Harry's now-wife, Fleur, once an aspiring actress, and after Sir Harry swept her away, he arranged to pay reparations in the form of a modest annual "arts grant" to Artair. The wonderfully gusty, cranky, self-dramatizing Artair, no shrinking violet, lets a young Cornish newspaper blogger know about his plight, and by a series of small, odd, but persuasively detailed steps, Artair's missing grant for provincial children's theater comes to threaten the centuries-old bank's sale, even its existence.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 1, 2011
Tubal and Company is in serious trouble. Despite a 300-year history of keeping its head above water, a woeful economy combined with bad decision-making by chairman Julian Trevelyan-Tubal are pushing the bank toward collapse. Julian plans to sell the bank by making it look good on paper while secretly diverting millions of pounds before the unsuspecting buyer, the British government, or his father, Sir Harry, find out. As in many a madcap scheme, the threat of discovery comes from the most unlikely source. Julians bane is unconventional actor and playwright Artair Macleod, an ex-husband of Fleur, Sir Harrys current wife. When Artairs monthly grant from Tubal and Company suddenly dries up, he enlists a young journalists help to find his missing money. As expected, worlds collide. Cartwright has made the resolution worth the journey, with a unique cast of characters inhabiting the unraveling, people strangely eccentric yet painfully recognizable. With wit and keen observation, Other Peoples Money is an entertaining, observant, and informative excursion into a distant world surprisingly close at hand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)