Talk about timing. Just as Robert Harris’s cautionary tale about the perils of meddling with the financial markets was hitting the shelves, Greece was teetering on the edge of default and Swiss Bank UBS announced that unauthorised trading by one of the company’s investment bankers had led to $2.3 billion worth of losses.
Harris has always had a nose for the topical. His 1999 novel, Archangel, noted that curious, self-sabotaging flaw in the Russian character which yearns for a totalitarian hard man in the Kremlin; a few years later, Vladimir Putin had completed his quiet ascent to the presidency. Harris’s wonderful 2007 thriller, The Ghost, functioned as a critique of the Blair government’s acquiescence in the face of grotesque American power. And in his trilogy about imperial Rome – Imperium, Lustrum, and Pompeii – some have detected a metaphor for the slow decline of western civilisation.
The Fear Index, which unfolds over the course of a single day in Switzerland, can be read as Harris’s response to the financial turmoil of the last few years. Our hero, if he can be classed as such, is American physicist Dr Alex Hoffmann, a borderline Aspergic who is
supremely indifferent to anything that [does] not engage him intellectually, a trait which had earned him a reputation… for being downright bloody rude.
Hoffmann, who lives in the same Geneva suburb in which Mary Shelley dreamed up the plot of Frankenstein, has invented VIXEL-4, an algorithmic super-computer that uses artificial intelligence to analyse every nuance of the stock market. In partnership with a smooth, public school educated front man, Hugo Quarry, Hoffman has set up a hedge fund that makes billion-dollar profits for its clients – until something starts to go wrong.
Novels about high finance are notoriously difficult to pull off.
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