At first, Paul Murray's novel looks as if it has arrived woefully late to the game, or two games: financial-crisis satire and post-modern game-playing. Since the derivatives market, in language and logic, was pretty much born pre-satirised, and since metafiction tends to produce what economists call diminishing returns, The Mark And The Void seems doomed to be unfunny and exhausting. That it is, on occasion, both those things is more a result of its great length than of general mismanagement. Most of the time, Murray's novel is closer to the opposite: hilarious and enthralling.
Murray doesn't alternate between writing about economics and writing about writing but instead rigs a scenario that allows him to write about both - and a lot of other things - at the same time.
In the opening pages, Claude, a French-born financial analyst working in Dublin, realises he is being stalked. His stalker shares a name with the author, although this Paul Murray's sole piece of published fiction is the unacclaimed For The Love Of A Clown; seven years on, there is no sign of a follow-up. Paul explains this situation to Claude, and convinces the banker that he would make an ideal subject for a novel.
So far, so 1980s, when Paul Auster and Martin Amis were forever putting author figures into their novels. More recently, in 2010, a device of this kind turned up as a plot twist in novels by Orhan Pamuk, Jonathan Coe and Peter Carey.
