The Mark and the Void is Paul Murray’s third novel, arriving last fall and four years after his widely praised and largely successful work “Skippy Dies.” Expectations have been high for his return. If Murray’s talent is sustainable, reflecting the easy wit and intelligent humor of the voices in his stories, there shouldn’t be much to worry about. With him you can kind of feel another hit coming.
Mark was promoted primarily as a comedy and an incisive spoof of the modern financial industry. Bordering this timeliness can add urgency to the reading, though some impact is diluted due to terrorism overtaking the spotlight of the western world’s dread. To some the financial calamities of 2008 may seem at least arguably a past era. Still, stocks are falling in China and the uncertainty reigns in the world’s economies so the Mark’s setting is believable.
Claude is a French ex-pat and investment banker living and working in Dublin. We are introduced to his life and history in the early pages of the book by a removed dialogue from an unnamed narrator. Claude’s own voice quickly steps in and settles the story, or at least gives it direction. After a solid investment in pages this direction is revealed as a spiral one, looping backward and over itself in circular self-awareness that a reader could find entertaining or equally head shaking. There is a real fear early on that Murray may be performing stunts to get his story across.
The author dangerously self-identifies in the novel when Claude meets Paul, a floundering writer who appears as a potential, though doubtful, spirit guide. The author as character attempts, amongst other increasingly desperate plots, to make Claude’s life story worthy and deserving of interest from the outside world. Claude delivers his side of these deals as he clings desperately to his new author friend’s promise for the definition of meaning in his life. Such meta-literary territory is usually reserved for first time writers, but Murray illustrates Paul with enough humor and exaggerated failure to keep himself clear of solipsism. Paul is just too pathetic to be real, one hopes anyway.
Another voice would be more in your face and even obnoxious but Murray’s easygoing, almost warm tone is preserved from Skippy and works again here. There are deep layers and heavier philosophy than a first time reading can make apparent, but Murray’s humor makes him the fun friend, the welcome party guest that does not take his barbs into the realm of self-display. He makes the right joke at the right time, smiles and steps away.
Getting to the existential value of the Mark proves to be the challenge of it’s reading. It takes a serious amount of faith in Murray’s skill or promise to deliver a hook to arrive at the near center of the novel where the existential value comes through.
A detached philosophic diatribe starts the later portion of the story. This free-floating chapter, a monologue really, presents plainly the book’s most interesting bits of philosophy. That’s not to say Murray depends on the speech to make his work magnetic. Ideas and concepts do move the story and but Murray is not clever, instead truly bright enough to plant the philosophy and burn it as fuel. The mid-story departure is Murray’s promise that yes; this is going to be as deep as we are hoping.
Still, beguiling intelligence and well-placed humor aside, it takes Murray a while to show where he is going. Claude’s naiveté and Paul’s self preservation clearly set them up as mark and void but there are a lot of chapters, hallmark Murray fringe characters and their shaky lives to get through before the plot finally flips completely over on itself.
The Mark cannot be called brilliant by standards of timelessness or universality but it is intricate, and impressive, and woven through with more threads than a critic should try to identify for fear of missing one and sounding stupid. The research achieved to speak accurately through any of the characters voices is stunning really, unless Murray spent time in the financial industry that his biography does not mention.
Explanations of economic processes are not spoon fed or cleverly injected; they are presented seamlessly into the narrative. Descriptions of the world’s banks failings are unobtrusive. This could have taken an incredible amount of research by Murray though it’s not the breadth of knowledge that impresses but the way it works into the story.
His fellow writers quoted on the Mark’s jacket compliment Murray in the wrong direction. The book is not about the financial industry, not solely anyway, and it is not a spoof of this world or a critique. Mark is an examination of reality, what this term means to us, through the lens of the simultaneously most influential and unreal of all societies institutions, its banks. The banks are a plot device and not the subject.
I have to think that if you took the banks away and replaced them with a steel mill, or a coal mine, or even a force of nature like a river or any other massive, unpredictable, largely ungovernable force that a group of people both try to control and depend on for their realities, you could make this story. But it might not be as funny. And this book was funny fairly often, probably more than I would like to admit.
A spiraling, self-aware story like Murray’s asks to be debated. Even the characters argue the value of their own stories, which make up the one we read, which turns back again into another story they create. Ask yourself if that sounds clever or frustrating. I could not decide until the end and I suppose in that the novel succeeded.
What the Mark does, though not as spectacularly as Skippy Dies, is gracefully present both the bitter and sweet of life in unison. It’s not that there are sad parts and happy parts in parallel, instead the characters are in real pain throughout most of the story but the world they live in is nearly ridiculous. They don’t laugh much, but we do, and not at them but at life around them.
Claude’s coworker, Ish, is his only counterpart with a visible, suffering soul. Her attempts to do the unimaginable and show concern for something outside of herself and the industry her and Claude dwell in go repeatedly ignored. After her latest effort to show real empathy is crushed before her she says, “At least someone will let me care about them.” Her plea and her pain go unnoticed by the other characters. No one says anything to her. The story rolls quickly on. This placement of truth inside swirling comedy illustrates the subtlety Murray can work with at times, and the heart. The wit, like the banks and the schemes and the plots, only carry us to his skill.
