Billionaires’ Banquet: an immorality tale for the 21st century by Ron Butlin
Posted in Reading Reviewed, Scottish Fiction, Scottish Literature at 12:00 on 5 January 2023
Salt, 2017, p.
The story is split between 1985, when its main characters first meet as residents at Barclay Towers in Edinburgh, and events surrounding the Occupy protests of 2005. In 1985 Hume is drifting, waiting to find a job after his University degree. His more or less girlfriend Cat’s thoughts are ruled by mathematics. Ex-theology student St Francis is obsessed with finding the proper arrangement of his furniture. One night they are joined in the flat by DD (Diana the Damned as she calls herself) who accompanies Hume to a party. Soon Cat has taken herself off and Hume is in a long-term relationship with DD. St Francis befriends Megan, who had been begging on the streets – a new, shocking, thing in Thatcher’s Britain. Hume’s efforts to begin to make money lead to a role providing butling services to the middle classes.
Twenty years later Hume has made it and has conceived the idea for a Billionaires’ Banquet where the rich will consume only rice and water for the evening – at enormous cost – for charity. Hume’s embroilment with the activities of Melville, an Edinburgh gangster, will lead to complications for Hume, DD – now an addict on happy pills – St Francis, Megan, who has her head screwed on as far as Melville’s likely reactions to Hume’s decision to go it alone are concerned, and Cat, returned from her professorship in Australia for a conference only to get caught up unwillingly in the Occupy protests.
This precis sounds like the book is a thriller but it really isn’t. It’s an examination of youthful naivety and the compromises people make when finding their place in the world. It’s also a between the lines commentary on the change in public mores brought on by the Thatcher years. The characters are entirely believable (though DD’s later reliance on drugs for her to function is a bit overdone. Then again, it has a plot purpose.) However, the leap of twenty years between the two halves of the story jars a little. Butlin’s writing has some sharp observations and is never less than engaging.
Pedant’s corner:- “a dice” (dice is plural, one of them is a die,) “to get off his ass” (arse,) Spanis (Spanish,) paus (pause,) “ordinary men and woman” (women.)
