Having never read anything by Sebastian Faulks before, I was surprised to find myself sailing through A Week in December’s 518 pages at a rate of knots.   Faulks is a wonderful writer with a sharp use of language, and an ability to provide vivid scenes both in narration and dialogue. 

After a brief opening, in which we meet the youngish couple who will eventually fall in love, we’re whisked off to the planning of a large dinner party, and in the process are introduced to most of the characters.   These two or three pages make a handy reference (and happily they’re easy to find), because they give us enough information about the characters to remind us who they are when they turn up later on, and fill in other details that are referred to throughout.

The only person who doesn’t appear at this point is the terrifying cyclist who drives without a light and nearly knocks over several of the characters at scattered points in the story.   In his most vivid appearance he navigates through cars at an intersection – against the red lights – and casually starts talking on his mobile.   He seems to act as a warning; only one of the characters really understands.

The book settles, in due course, on half a dozen main characters. John Veals (if there was an ‘n’ in his name – Venal – it would be appropriate), is a wheeler and dealer of huge amounts of money, and a man without a heart of any kind.   Hassan is a young British-born Muslim, who gradually ‘understands’ that killing lots of people will bring about some sort of Islamic Utopia.  His counterpart is Veals’ son, a youth who spends most of his life holed up in his room watching dreadful television and taking drugs.   There’s also the bitter and twisted book reviewer who reviles anything written in the 20th or 21st century.   And of course, there is the young couple, an impoverished lawyer and a tube train driver, who manage to remain mostly unstained by the dark world around them.

Apart from the Church, everything in British society is satirised, much of it with enormous fierceness.   But the satire is mixed with genuine humour (even good humour, at times), and with compassion for the characters who need it.    Until we discover what is to be the target of Hassan and his mates’ bombs, there are times when you think a bomb underneath this society might be a good thing. 

The writing has a breathtaking assurance about it, and even in the passages where Veals and his cronies discuss arcane banking and investment deals, we keep on reading because it makes sense enough without us needing to understand the details.   The range of characters is wide, with many of them doubling other characters in an intriguing way.   (The lawyer’s brother is in a psychiatric ward, and much of what he says parallels the crazy rantings of the Islamic youths.)   There are connections all over the place: a girl on an Internet porn site turns up in real life, to the surprise of those who ‘know’ her, as does a person from the virtual world Parallex.  The chutney magnate and the book reviewer connect in a most unlikely fashion, the Muslim boy uses ‘YourSpace’ which was set up by a couple at the dinner party, and so on. 

As the pace increase, the book becomes more and more difficult to put down.   I read it in three great gulps.