THE CRYTOGRAPHER
By Tobias Hill
Faber & Faber, £12; 224pp
ISBN 0571218369
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IN this novel of the near future, London retains a shadow of its former status as financial capital of the world. Coins and paper money have all but disappeared, except from the bowls of beggars in the streets, and the invisible electronic currency of choice in domestic and international markets is Soft Gold: “The world’s favourite way to pay!” Soft Gold is a supposedly unbreakable, mutating code, a tame virus that leaves you “free to work in the knowledge that your money is secure, now and in the future.” It is the invention of a cryptographer named John Law after the maverick economic genius who plunged Europe into crisis in 1720. He is the world’s first quadrillionaire. The novel begins with Law under investigation by the Inland Revenue.
Tobias Hill’s acknowledgements thank the Inland Revenue for “reluctant answers”. His novel presents British bureaucracy of the future as astonishingly unchanged, uncooperative and trivially coherent. Anna Moore, grade A2 tax-inspector, is assigned to John Law and everyone is puzzled as to why the richest man in the world does not merit a grade A1 inspector.
Anna is 38, single, attractive and good at her job: an Anita Brookner heroine, projected into the year 2021 and coping very well with small and ordinary disappointments in her life. When she falls in love with Law, she does so calmly, drifting into a series of poised meditations on the nature of human relationships. Love and money make the world go round, she reflects, but both of them turn on trust.
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Law is charmingly enigmatic. At a sumptuous party in the London suburb he has bought and remodelled, he hides like The Great Gatsby, surrounded by the crates of things his wife purchased before their marriage fell apart.
Mrs John Law, beautiful but not mentally ill as she would be in Scott Fitzgerald, generously intuits Anna’s feelings and offers her advice: “One thing you should know about my husband. I never knew when I could trust him.”
Such intrinsically worthless advice, from one woman to another, is strangely valuable in the world of The Cryptographer. The appeal of John Law and his Soft Gold is the promise of complete security. “No one ever said no to him. He said he was going to change the world, and — everyone believed him . . . everything he said came true.” But Soft Gold proves a flawed system, and Law is not the thoroughly reliable, effective and trustworthy human being he seems. “I never meant to hurt anyone,” he protests, as global finance collapses and his long-suffering wife leaves him.
Anna’s relationship with Law explores the prospects for trust in discredited circumstances. From the beginning she knows he is, at best, a liar. There are rumours that he is criminal too and has knowingly put lives at risk practicing his “science of concealment”. Her interest in him is forensic, bordering obsessional: “I want to know who you think of, when you think of money.” His interest in her is caught in the recurring question: “Are you my enemy?” Nothing in this oddly futuristic and beautiful book is as beguiling as its romance.
Hill’s novels are often characterised as thrillers. This one inverts the genre. It is not dependent on discovery or surprise since everything that happens — however bizarre — is expected by one or other of the characters. Instead it is about “the smooth and pervasive presence of deception”, and the need we all have to ignore it, to keep on trusting imperfect people in an unstable world for as long as we possibly can.