The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray’s satirical look at the banking scandals of the not too distant past. Set in the Dublin office of the Bank of Torabundo (BoT), a bank incorporated somewhere in the South Pacific on an island with an extinct volcano and an extremely benevolent tax climate, it has many industry details that parallel the idiocy of actual banks going bust. However, thanks to its conservative CEO, BoT has survived the subprime mortgage meltdown, while its larger neighbors in the Dublin’s International Financial Services Centre have become zombie banks, i.e., banks that exist only because the government will or may prop them up with taxpayer funded loans. Rather than reward their CEO, the bank Directors replace him with a new lead banker who has just led an enormous bank into insolvency. The reason for the change…no one is crazy enough to do risky financing now, so BoT will make a fortune! The new CEO establishes BoT’s new motto as Think Counterintuitive! and proceeds to overleverage the bank.
The story’s protagonist is a highly respected analyst named Claude. While a good banker, Claude’s level-headedness takes a vacation when he hires an obvious conman to be his biographer/life coach. Of course, hijinks ensue. While Claude and his office mates make financial decisions that can ruin companies, industries, countries, even their own finances, the biggest decisions of the day are always where to go for lunch or for a few beers after work. That part of the book reads like nonfiction.
In the end, you will enjoy the cynical look at banking and the characters that work at the bank, but there are many other things going on in the book, and had it been half as long, it would have been twice as clever. Neither a BUY or a SELL, this one is a HOLD.
The Pequonnock Iluminado 