Idea for a novel: we have a banker rob his own bank. He’s working alone; at first, it’ll look like a classic inside job. This man, however, is not what you’d call an insider. He’s French, not Irish, and although initially he might look like a typical Parisian – black suit, expensive shoes, hair neat but worn slightly long – as the story unfolds and his past comes to light, we find out he never quite fitted in over there either. He didn’t grow up in a leafy suburb, didn’t attend a fancy grande école of the kind that bankers tend to come from; instead he spent his childhood in a run-down corner that the city prefers to disown, and his father’s something blue-collar – a welder maybe, a veteran of 1968, a tough nut.
The family doesn’t have much: the father’s job is precarious, they’re constantly resorting to moneylenders, bailiffs come to take the car away, all that. But the father’s ambitious for the boy; the father’s determined that he’ll have a better life. So the son beavers away in his third-rate school and makes it into a second-rate university, and after graduating at the top of his class, he’s offered a position in a prestigious French bank. It’s dull work, mostly filing and admin, but he’s diligent and quick and after a few months his manager takes note of him and recommends him for a start in the Research Department.
As a junior analyst, his official role is to dig up information on companies for the bank and its clients. In practice, he spends his time fixing paper jams, fetching coffees and listening politely while his boss describes his recent sexual adventures. When he gets to do his job, though, he finds that he likes it. More importantly, he’s good at it. He watches money flow through the market, learns the secret influences at work on it, begins to understand how a speech made by an obscure politician in, say, Guangzhou can send stock prices soaring, while a rumour about a change in the interest rate can spark a worldwide panic. He works early mornings, late nights, hour after hour in the cold glow of the screen, developing models, monitoring trades, figuring out the best way to persuade a client that he and all of his competitors have got the value of a stock completely wrong. One morning, he checks his bank balance and sees he’s got his first bonus: three times what his father would make in a year. That’s when he knows he’s made it.
But his father’s not happy. Instead, he looks at the trophies of his son’s success – the car, the suit, the unblemished hands – and despises them. It makes no sense – this is what he wanted for him! – yet the higher the boy climbs, the angrier the old man becomes. Everything the banker does to impress him has the opposite effect. He brings little gifts to the house, the father won’t accept them. He takes them for dinner, the old man won’t eat. They argue incessantly, the father berating the son for things he has nothing to do with – the neighbourhood changing, the rents going up, the President being elected. He calls him a deserter, a traitor. He looks at his son and sees the emissary of a world that no longer needs him.
What can the banker do? Does the old man genuinely want him to give up his job? That would be crazy, right? Besides, he likes it. He likes being wealthy and respected.