Drayton and Mackenzie – not a gentleman’s outfitters, but a novel – is an example of a genre that has become vanishingly rare of late: the capacious, ambitious, politically engaged Bildungsroman, in this case one that follows two friends from their callow undergraduate days to the moral maturity of adulthood and a deeper understanding of the society they inhabit. While American authors have explored the idea of two diametrically opposed men caught up in the sweep of history (one thinks of The Great Gatsby or Humboldt’s Gift), it is hard to think of many British writers who have attempted the same. Starritt fills the gap admirably in this, his third novel, covering much ground, from the financial crash to Covid, while never losing sight of his two lively, occasionally infuriating young gunslingers.
We first meet James Drayton as an Oxford-bound, high-flying A-level student who has always found things “too easy”. A dry, slightly fogeyish grafter, James puts in a forty-hour week of study while his peers squander their time on nightclubs or sports. While his parents are gregarious academics – “not poshos” – James hasn’t yet learnt the vital social skills he’ll need to progress in step with his academic accomplishments. He doesn’t know how “to talk to people at parties without turning it into a seminar”. It is significant that, when he first meets Roland Mackenzie – his future business partner and best friend – he doesn’t notice him. Starritt sets up Roland as the Sundance to James’s Butch, with their opposing personalities clashing for years before they reach an understanding of each other. While James has all the attributes of a ruthless high achiever, Roland “had none of those qualities, and didn’t want them”, and much of the novel is spent exploring whether one’s fundamental nature changes and how much the influence of others counts.
The pair next cross paths in London, where James jealously observes that Roland, who has been travelling in India, is as “tanned as a surf instructor … very skinny”. He also discovers that Roland only scraped a 2:2, which to him is “like announcing he had erectile dysfunction”. With his “natural tendency to rise”, James has been taken on by McKinsey, where he works on a contract for the now defunct Department for International Development. To his astonishment, the consultancy also hires Roland, and his friend quickly becomes established as the butt of his colleagues’ jokes (“he wasn’t good at anything they recognised”). At times, James despairs of his old Oxford chum: “James was trying to train him, like his mum wiring an unruly plant to a trellis”.
Despite their sparring, both come to recognize that they can benefit from each other’s skills, and when they are sent on a mission to sack employees in the Aberdeen oil industry, they bond as the trip descends into a Withnailesque mistaken holiday. It is at this point that James presents his friend with a life-changing plan. Instead of being perpetual employees, they will start an energy company, but an ethical one, “for the glory, achievement and the good of the planet”. And so they set up as Drayton and Mackenzie Ltd, and go into business making tidal turbines that generate zero-carbon hydrogen.
It is now that we sense James’s slightly avaricious instincts changing in sympathy with Roland’s gentler view of humanity. As James submits to adult responsibility, he realizes that this comes with a sense of loss for both of them: the “possible destinies, the protean turmoil within them, resolved into a small number of almost-solid shapes”. He also sees that everything he had envisaged about growing up was chimerical:
James was realising that this was the nature of adult life. There were no breakthroughs into clear open space. Every time you were just getting into your stride, something tripped you. It was like trying to construct a functioning car out of pasta shapes.
Starritt takes much delight in satirizing James’s seriousness and relentless pragmatism, integrating the personal and the mercantile in the book’s funniest scene. After James takes to Tinder, he finds himself performing oral sex on “a woman who wrote for World of Interiors”, only to realize that “he’d been thinking for some time already about the oil price … The lad’s-mag advice was to draw the letters of the alphabet around the clitoris. Instead of the alphabet, he’d been drawing B-R-E-N-T–C-R-U-D-E”.
Later, when James gets a proper girlfriend – the exigent Alice – Roland suddenly feels left out. But even the unfortunate trope of a woman coming between two male buddies can’t separate them. When James is hospitalized with Type 1 diabetes, it is Roland who comes to his rescue. And when the pandemic hits and the book takes a far more serious turn, Roland proves to be James’s most steadfast ally.
At 500 pages, Drayton and Mackenzie can feel overlong. The passages dramatizing the American subprime crisis feel superfluous and intrusive. But Alexander Starritt can write as elegantly as Alan Hollinghurst and as fluently as Jonathan Coe. It is the prose that keeps us turning the pages of this epic novel of friendship and twenty-first-century life.
Jude Cook teaches Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. His second novel is Jacob’s Advice, 2020. He recently launched a new press, Conduit Books
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