Latest news with #DraytonandMackenzie
Scotsman
18-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt review: 'a richly enjoyable novel of ideas'
Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... I haven't read Alexander Starritt's first two novels, both of which have won prizes, but Drayton and Mackenzie will surely win more. Starritt was born in Scotland, but I have no idea whether he thinks of himself as a Scot. Since a considerable part of this new novel is set in Aberdeen at a time when the oil industry was in trouble after the financial crisis, he may well do so. Certainly he writes of Aberdeen with interest and authority. This novel of Victorian length and ambition has something in common with Andrew O'Hagan's Caledonia Road; certainly it is every bit as ambitious. An oil industry supply vessel docked at Aberdeen Harbour (Picture: Andy Buchanan) | AFP via Getty Images Drayton and Mackenzie sounds like a Department Store, but - another Victorian touch - these are the names of the two heroes. They meet first at the same Oxford College, rowing in the same boat in their first year there. James Dayton is a high-flier, the cleverest man of his year. Roland Mackenzie is lazy and disorganised. In my time at Cambridge someone like Dayton would have become an academic, or gone to the Bar with the intention of heading for Parliament and ministerial office. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Dayton joins McKinsey, the American management consultancy company, eve though he's not sure it is worthy of his talent or ambition. Roland, meanwhile, is a drifter with a poor degree. He goes to India and teaches in a very small school. Some years later they meet in a London pub. What Roland says of Indian education interests James: there's somenthing he can get his teeth into. He recruits Roland for his team, and keeps him though Roland is lazy and incompetent. They are very different, yet bound increasingly together. James still lives with hsi parents, and Starritt is good on family life. James and Roland don't quite share girlfriends, but come close to doing so. Then comes the financial crash. James is sent to Aberdeen where over-manned oil companies are in trouble, and takes Roland with him. It's a ruthless time. Their job is to sack people. It's brutal, but has to be done. For me, the Aberdeen section is the best part of the novel - capitalism in crisis, red in tooth nd claw. Yet it is Aberdeen and a meeting with an engineer who has a vision of how to revive the oil boom that, for the first time, gives James the sort of challenge he has been looking for. He keeps Roland with him - Roland, he now knows, has qualities he lacks. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad That's enough of the plot, though there's still a long way to go. This is a novel rich in detail, rich too in background, the parents and extended families of both men being brought convincingly to life. Starritt contrives to blend private life, family matters, girlfriends and parties with a serious and often disturbing picture of the times we live in. Combining public and private life is a challenge to any novelist, but Starritt meets it triumphantly. At the novel's heart is the relationship between the two men. I suppose their unlikely friendship is what is now called a bromance; an unlikely but persuasive one. It is also a picture of the times in which we live. Anthony Trollope called one of his finest novels The Way We Live Now, and this would have been a suitable title for Starritt's novel too. For a long time, the best literary novels have fought shy of public life, confining themselves to slim and elegant personal stories - on this side of the Atlantic anyway. Starritt, however, has boldly tackled a big subject, and if there are passages which you think might have been pruned, the novel's vitality is such that you are swept along by the story. It is a novel of ideas which is also richly enjoyable; a novel that demands more than a weekly reviewer can offer, for it calls for a second reading and a slow one if its riches are to be fully grasped.
Spectator
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
An unlikely alliance: Drayton and Mackenzie, by Alexander Starritt, reviewed
Alexander Starritt has form with satire. His 2017 debut The Beast skewered the modern tabloid press, drawing comparisons with Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. For his third novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, he is back at it, mercilessly mocking everything from Oxbridge and management consultants to tech bros and new parents in a story that hinges on whether two unlikely friends can make a success of their tidal energy start-up. It's more fun that it sounds. The narrative opens in the early 2000s with James Drayton – someone who gets his kicks by finishing his maths A-level exam in 20 minutes and who finds undergraduate life disappointingly basic. 'He supposed he'd been naive to think of university as concerned with intellect… At this level, Oxford was just an elementary course in information-processing, a training school for Britain's future lawyers, politicians and administrators,' writes Starritt, using the omniscient voice. Lest this seem too obnoxious, James is self-aware enough to realise that finishing his exams so quickly meant 'he would have to leave the exam room alone while the rest of his class stayed inside together'. One of Starritt's many skills is how he ratchets up the poignancy, creating real characters rather than caricatures. The yang to Drayton's yin comes in the form of Roland Mackenzie, an Oxford slacker who scrapes a 2:2. They're at the same college but barely clock each other. Later, when James is the subject of articles and interviews, he will be asked if it's true that they were both in the same rowing boat. 'James didn't notice him at the time.' After Roland takes a gap year or two teaching in India, he somehow winds up at McKinsey, working alongside James. Roland finds it catastrophically boring. 'But even that he quite enjoyed, since the boringness was so authentic, like going to New York and it being just like the movies.' As the duo strike out on their own, seeking to disrupt electricity generation with a scheme to turn tidal power into light, at least initially, Starritt's granular detail over 500-odd pages skirted a similarly fine line between boring me and impressing me with its authenticity. There are even cameos from the central bankers Ben Bernanke and Mario Draghi as the world economy tanks, although the step-by-step exposition in these chapters is overkill. What with the emotion of the escalating bromance and making James someone 'who hasn't read a novel since university', Starritt goes all out to hook the same sort of elusive male reader who lapped up Andrew O'Hagan's tear-jerking Mayflies. And good luck to him. He certainly hooked me.
New Statesman
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
The Great Men of history 2.0
Photo by Gueorgui Pinkhassov / Magnum Photos Sweat darkens the armpits of the millennial Caesar's grey T-shirt as another funding round nears its end. Coding, not conquest, will immortalise him. The entrepreneurs of every age require a stage for their greatness, and for ours it's not the subjugation of Gaul, but the bloodless 'tech' start-up. And that's what motivates James Drayton to start a tidal-power firm with his friend Roland Mackenzie in Alexander Starritt's novel Drayton and Mackenzie, an attempt at a millennial epic that covers the century so far and most of its attendant disasters. Starritt is an ex-Daily Mail journalist and the author of two previous novels, The Beast (2017) and We Germans (2020). He is also an entrepreneur, so it is surprising that the romance of James's ambitions should read so platitudinously. He compares himself with Columbus, Napoleon and, after acquiring a rival start-up, 'Caesar receiving the surrender of Vercingetorix'. 'We're going to take our place in the pantheon of great men,' he says, 'and cover ourselves in glory.' Hollywood aside, I am not convinced that anyone – let alone a 'Great Man' – has ever spoken in this way. James and Roland first meet on their Oxford college rowing team in the early Noughties, but only become 'buddies' when they're both working for McKinsey. In spite of their differences, their friendship becomes 'the big relationship' in each other's lives. James is so clever and competitive that he 'trains' for exams, finishing top of his year in PPE, but suffers 'the perennial fear that he should have studied computer science instead'. Roland is a drifter with a 2:2 who likes ketamine, Arsenal, the Harlem Shake, 'Lols' and James's girlfriend. He also likes travel, which allows Starritt to have uncertain fun with some nondescript foreign characters: a Japanese porter speaks 'like in the stereotypes', while an Indian woman says 'worry' as 'vurry' and 'wobbled her head in the Indian way'. The novel opens in 2004, when it's been 'conclusively settled… how a society should be organised'. Such hubris warrants a kick, which duly comes in 2007, when 'a storm was picking up' in America as homeowners defaulted on their mortgages. Within a sentence, the banks 'cracked' and 'split' and only then 'began to crumble'. A university acquaintance appears on the cover of the Evening Standard holding a cardboard box outside Lehman Brothers. There are now only three rows of business class on domestic flights. Consultants are the ragpickers of the wasted economy, and so James and Roland emerge unscathed, dampening Starritt's point. 'Restructuring' at an oil firm in Aberdeen, they meet an engineer who has designed a tidal turbine that will float on the Pentland Firth, and Drayton-Mackenzie Ltd is born. Over 300 pages of funding rounds, product trials and the occasional health scare, money does an unusual thing: it makes them better people. The Crash Years are punctuated with brief docudramas: one follows Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, as he tries to stop the investment bank Bear Stearns failing in 2008, while in 2012 Mario Draghi saves the Euro in a speech at the Bank of England. So what? Starritt wants us to know that each of them is 'just a man', in the ambiguous, tortured way that literature shows us all to be. They are just men and the market is a historical force, one which will affect the lives of the real people who had 'kept up their end of the social contract'. But if they're only mortals with academic qualifications, then 'disrupters' like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are Olympians steering humanity onwards. When Thiel, an investor in Drayton-Mackenzie, is an early Trump backer, 'his instinctive contrarianism was now seen as a pitilessly accurate reading of the times'. He speaks in long, Thiel-like formulations ('egregious regulatory obstructionism') and asks James: 'Do you know Elon Musk?' Once an imposingly virile Musk appears ('Musk by name…'), James reflects that he'll be 'name-checked on page 1' of 21st-century histories. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Drayton and Mackenzie is a novel about business and friendship which documents historical events but fails in its main ambition: to illustrate how those events shape and are shaped by their apparent Great Men. Ultimately, on the terrifyingly abrupt resumption of history which it seeks to address, it asks only the spliffily passive question posed by Roland the morning after Brexit: 'Do you ever get the feeling that, like, since the financial crisis, all the news has been bad news?' Drayton and Mackenzie Alexander Starritt Swift Press, 512pp, £16.99 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: How terror came home on 7/7] Related
