Poignant and beautifully written: Scottish author's tale of friendship

The Herald Scotland

8 hours ago

It begins at Oxford in 2004, with two students who are barely on nodding terms with each other. James Drayton is a natural problem-solver, hyper-focused, intensely practical, but with negligible social skills. Convinced he's destined for great things, he powers through his PPE degree only to wind up working in management consultancy, which feels dull and anti-climactic after all that heroic striving.
Drayton and Mackenzie is rich in character (Image: Swift)
Roland Mackenzie lacks James's drive. He finds it harder to commit himself, pursuing his dreams but then sabotaging them with his inability to put in the necessary effort. He has a passion for Japanese, but his plan to become a teacher in Japan fizzles out after he is posted to India instead. His successful attempt to secure an interview with a genuine Yakuza degenerates into an embarrassing fiasco because he's neglected to carry out any preparation for it.
They're such contrasting personalities that it's hard to imagine them becoming friends – until James gets an idea for a business venture that Roland could be useful for. It's the beginning of an awkward friendship that, as the years go by, becomes almost like a marriage. Roland is much more of a people person, able to win over investors and inspire employees when James's grand mission statements flounder. He becomes a partner in James's next big project: harnessing tidal energy (distinct from wave energy) from the seas around Orkney to generate power and, in the long run, to actually change the world.
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For two relatively inexperienced businessmen, it's a challenge of almost inhuman magnitude. Starritt, though, is something of an entrepreneurial guru (he writes columns for the World Economic Forum) and shows, step by step, how they build a multi-million-pound enterprise from scratch, predicting all the logistical, technical, financial and political obstacles that could stand in their way. His passion for detail suggests that the author is not unlike James Drayton in his capacity to absorb information and focus on problems with a laser-like intensity. His readers will end up learning more about marine engineering, large-scale projects and international finance from this novel than they bargained for.
But what will keep them reading is how Starritt, in beautifully lucid prose, has seamlessly connected it all to the growth of his two central characters and the nuanced relationship between them, which runs from blokeish teasing, mutual irritation and smouldering grievance to unshakeable trust, tenderness and self-sacrifice.
It's wonderfully done, and there's an added poignancy from their gradual realisation that the choices they made in their twenties, swept up by the notion of building a better world, have had the effect of narrowing the scope of their lives, closing off other paths they could have taken and, consequently, the people they could have been. An affecting tale of friendship and loyalty, Drayton and Mackenzie also makes us reflect on the choices that have defined us.