Drayton and Mackenzie: a tale of two city bros

Starritt’s second novel, We Germans (2020), was a remembrance of the second world war, inflected by his family history and Scottish-German heritage. Like its predecessors, Drayton and Mackenzie is populated by characters in thrall to an idea of the past, just as they are attempting to conquer an ill-defined future. Here, the 21st-century manufacturing industry, rather than the hot metal of Fleet Street, provides the narrative bedrock: the novel’s titular pair, hyper-focused James Drayton and charming underachiever Roland Mackenzie, aim to revive the glories of Scottish invention and engineering to transform the planet’s need for cheap, clean and inexhaustible energy.

It’s clear that Starritt understands that our attention will be easier to hold with personalities than with granular explanations of the construction of tidal-powered sea turbines, though he dispenses multiple micro-doses of the latter, complete with forays into optimum blade angles, hydraulic pumps and the complexities of hydrogen production. If only a small fraction of readers will be able to decode these passages, perhaps not many more will understand the mixture of braggadocio and high finance required to fund such an undertaking, which probably explains the brief appearances of venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in the novel (Musk is acutely and humorously portrayed arriving late to a meeting with a huge entourage, bestowing a few seconds’ attention on our entrepreneurs and then transforming their fortunes with a tweet).

But we all understand ambition, disillusionment, rivalry, excitement, boredom and the knife-edge between vaulting success and abject failure. And we have also lived through the enormous negative effects visited on the many by the cascading decisions of the few: a section near the beginning portrays Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, looking at photograph albums of his children at dawn while waiting for the phone call that will trigger 2008’s financial crisis.

These global events – market meltdown, climate crisis, Brexit and the pandemic all feature – underwrite Drayton and Mackenzie but are secondary to its more enticing personal dramas, which might be compactly described as the comedy of the odd couple. James Drayton provides the oddness. His drive to achieve manifests itself in obsessive self-monitoring: when he decides to get fit after a life-altering illness, he relies on a phone notification to know when to switch from trampolining to Zumba (he rotates sports every six months “just in case I get attached”), and seeks to boost his romantic life with daily 20-minute allocations of Tinder. Where Drayton’s approach to life bewilders even his own parents, a nicely drawn pair of middle-class academics, Mackenzie is an utter charmer, beguiling investors and women alike, blessed with the gift of the gab and the self-acceptance to half-ass everything in his path.

That the two men – barely friends at Oxford who wash up at the same management consultancy – actually love each other is Starritt’s not-so-secret weapon amid the lengthy disquisitions into corporate finance and the likely future of space travel (tellingly, it is only on the cusp of being taken over by colonising billionaires, and part of the novel’s interest is in showing how the futurologists get it wrong). Their mutual appreciation society survives not only Mackenzie’s ability to nick Drayton’s girlfriend from under his nose, but also his barely contained desperation to quit the company to pursue his entirely fanciful dream of living in Japan. If their friendship at times verges on the unbelievable, Starritt’s valiant defence of it makes a compelling case for the importance of sentimentality in fiction as much as in life.

Drayton and Mackenzie is a curious novel, its aim not always entirely discernible: is it a satire of the contemporary startup, a grand state-of-the-nation address, a touching deep dive into male friendship? It tries to be all three, and if it doesn’t pull it off at every turn, it is nonetheless engagingly energetic and possessed of a certain endearing stubbornness – like Drayton himself, and the tides he seeks to harness.

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