Trading Futures/ Jim Powell

When it comes to writing about angst and misery some feel that women do this best. I disagree. Novelists like Edward St Aubyn and now Jim Powell can “do” self- recrimination, pathos, self-absorption, fragmentation of the character with humour and sensitivity.

Jim Powell has an interesting eclectic background. A history graduate from Cambridge he went into advertising ending as a CEO, was involved in Conservative politics standing as a candidate for Coventry, started a ceramic business and came to novel writing late but successfully with The Breaking the Eggs an account of the post-war Communist world seen through the eyes of a survivor of the Lodz ghetto. His second novel Trading Futures could not be more different. He has a most unreliable narrator Matthew whom we soon realise is in the throes of a breakdown, an alcoholic rapidly losing his grip on reality after he had been fired from his job as a coffee future trader.

What makes Matthew almost endearing is his humour and the respect for his wife Judy whom he wants to leave for a woman with whom he had an adolescent fling. The reader is privy to his innermost confused thoughts often formulated whilst driving with too much whisky drunk. The unreliable narrator is a well known device but it can have two difficulties. In the case of Shantaram the self perception may differ from the reader’s and secondly is it autobiographical? In Shantaram yes, in Trading Futures no. Interestingly Jim Powell’s wife is a literary editor and the career trajectory and collapse of Matthew are not the same. One interesting feature of the novel is the age of the narrator (60). This is no midlife crisis but a man surveying a life he finds unfulfilled in terms of the aspirations of his youth.

The story is taut. There is the ever present concern that Matthew will top himself and intriguing as to what is truth and what is fantasy. There are a couple of twists at the end which is left in suspension like a good French film.