Roland Mackenzie and James Drayton first meet at Oxford, where they row in the same boat. They don’t become friends immediately. Roland is likable and boyish with an enormous lust for life (and lust in general). Instead of studying for his degree, he goes to Japan to meet the Yakuza, and ends up getting drunk every night in seedy Tokyo bars with a girl from his hostel. He graduates with a 2:2. James, on the other hand, comes top of his class. He’s a whizz with no social skills, kind of like Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock: a dumb caricature of a genius.
Drayton and Mackenzie is a novel with impressive scope, beginning in 2005 and ending in 2021, with an epilogue that jumps 20 years into the future. It follows the two boys’ lives, which converge again years after university, in a chance encounter in a pub that eventually leads to the founding of a radical clean-energy company.
Each chapter is drawn with amazing realism and detail. The dialogue is true to a large cast of different characters from different worlds. One of its most striking moments is a meeting with Peter Thiel in 2014. Starritt has an extraordinary ability to capture not only the texture of an individual life but also the underlying economic and political tremors that shape it across time.
James and Roland are “like marbles dropped onto a domed roof: they could have rolled in any direction, sent one way or another by the slightest dent or bobble in its surface”. Once they start rolling, they lose possibilities, and to gain them again would be “to run against gravity”.
Halfway through the book, Roland turns to James. “I don’t want to be a downer, mate, but there is part of me that still thinks: there used to be all these different things – Japan, India, London, Aberdeen. Now it’s just this one thing.” It’s a feeling that runs through the novel, the sense that you end up on a path you didn’t quite choose but can’t escape from. The feeling is sometimes desolate and sometimes reverent.
Starritt’s achievement lies in making the sweep of history profoundly personal; Drayton and Mackenzie is the story of two men, but also of the era they inhabit.
