Billionaire’s Banquet

Ron Butlin

Salt, £8.99

Review by Richard Strachan

RON Butlin’s fifth novel is split into two roughly equal parts, the first covering the summer of 1985, the second accounting for the summer of 2005. In the first part, a group of students sharing a Bruntsfield flat (Barclay Towers) find themselves at varying crossroads in their lives.

Hume, a philosophy graduate, has recently published an essay in the journal Thought and is convinced that a glittering future in public policy awaits him.

"Mrs Thatcher claps her eyes on it," he claims, "she’ll make me her chief advisor!"

St Francis, a lapsed Catholic who has dropped out of the seminary, masks his religious and sexual confusion with an obsessive rearranging of his furniture.

The Cat, sometime lover of Hume, carries weightier baggage; responsible for the death of her sister when they were children, she has formed a life for herself of strictly regimented study and hedonism. When "black-haired, dark eyed" DD makes an appearance, "swaying in through the kitchen door with her midsummer smile and a bottle of Blue Nun", Hume transfers his lustful affections to her instead of the Cat and precipitates a general break up of the group, only to see them all reconvene 20 years later.

The 1980s part is clearly where most of Butlin’s attention and interest lies, and he paints an affectionate portrait of Edinburgh and its penurious student life, where cans of McEwan’s Export are dubbed "Scottish Champagne" and the student diet consists solely of Pot Noodles, Cup-a-Soups and tea. Hume is the character most in tune with the times, and his admiration for Mrs Thatcher is presented (without subtly) in the most crunchingly naive terms.

Seeing a beggar on the streets for the first time, Hume is bewildered; surely, he thinks, "Mrs Thatcher’s new policies were creating new wealth and opportunities, offering everyone the chance to set their own goals and to succeed."

St Francis later hooks up with that same beggar, Megan, and in a confused charitable gesture offers her a place to live in Barclay Towers.

After the Cat goes missing, disappearing from a rooftop party so suddenly that the other characters think she must have plunged down to the pavement below, Hume is compelled to make something of himself so he can recapture DD’s waning attention and sets up his own business, Executive Service, supplying butlers and waiting staff for the new breed of Thatcherite rich.

Fast forward 20 years to 2005 and, improbably, everyone still has some connection to the flat at Barclay Towers. Hume and DD are married, rich and successful, with Executive Service an esteemed brand.

St Francis and Megan are still together and living in the top floor flat at Barclay Towers. Hume now owns the building and has made a dodgy deal with a local gangster called Melville to use it as a high-class brothel.

Unfortunately, Hume owes Melville £150,000, and his inability to pay threatens to derail his high-profile fund-raising party, the Billionaire’s Banquet of the title, timed to coincide with the Make Poverty History campaign. Meanwhile, we are reintroduced to the Cat, and given a potted history of the intervening 20 years from her perspective; flight from the flat, moving to Australia to study mathematics, a doctorate, lectureship, marriage and divorce.

The Cat finds herself back in Scotland to tie up her late’s mother’s estate, and in a series of ludicrous coincidences finds herself caught up in the anti-globalisation protests that, inevitably, target Hume’s fat-cat fundraising event.

For a story that includes so much sex, drinking, poverty, prostitution and greed, Billionaire’s Banquet suffers most from its vague air of geniality.

Although it’s billed as "An immorality tale for the 21st century", what on the surface promises to be a scurrilous satire, skewering the self-indulgence and social cost of turbocharged neolberalism, is instead curiously mild and inoffensive, coloured more with nostalgia for the carefree days of student life than any sense of righteous indignation. The characters are more collations of quirks and backstories, and there’s little sense of their growth or development in the intervening 20 years between each part.

A more savage and satirical novel could have pulled off the coincidences that motor the plot by calling attention to their absurdity, but here it feels as if Butlin is trying to smuggle them quickly past the reader instead, and the gangster sub-plot in the second half feels completely unnecessary.

It’s also one of those books where the author, perhaps justifying the shoe-leather used in its research, feels the need to narrate his characters’ every step the moment they leave the house.

Hume, for example, can’t just make his way to the Central Library, but has to walk from Bruntsfield to Tollcross, then to West Bow, then into the Grassmarket, then past Greyfriar’s Men’s Hostel, then up Victoria Terrace, until finally he reaches George IV Bridge. Getting the full Edinburgh A-Z adds nothing to the story, and conversely makes its narration feel artificial rather than natural or authentic.

At the core of Billionaire’s Banquet is an entertaining knockabout comedy about the way early ambition is tempered by reality, or how noble principles inevitably give way to self-interest, but it buckles under the weight of Butlin’s need to make it seem socially and politically relevant.