A Week in December

Pre-Crash London

Sebastian Faulks wrote A Week in December in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The novel is set in the week before Christmas 2007 — London just before the fall. John Veals, hedge fund manager, is shorting the stock of a British bank he knows will fail. He is right. He will profit. He does not think this is immoral.

The other six characters — footballer’s wife, tube driver, Muslim student being radicalised, book reviewer, a young professional woman — orbit around Veals and around each other. Faulks uses the multi-character structure to give the reader a cross-section of pre-crash London.

The Financial Portrait

The novel’s most effective sections are the financial ones. Veals is not a caricature — he is someone who genuinely believes that markets are amoral mechanisms and that he is simply operating correctly within them. Faulks’s portrait is more troubling than a villain would be because Veals’s logic is internally coherent.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set A Week in December apart: The financial crisis material — written just after 2008 — captures the pre-crash atmosphere with uncomfortable accuracy; The hedge fund manager John Veals is one of the more convincing portraits of financial sector amorality in literary fiction; and The multiple-perspective structure allows Faulks to range across class and culture. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

A Panorama of Pre-Crash London

A Week in December is Sebastian Faulks’s “state-of-England” novel, a deliberate attempt to capture London in the days before the 2008 financial crisis through a wide ensemble of loosely connected characters. Over one week in December 2007, Faulks moves among a hedge-fund manager, John Veals, coldly engineering a trade that will profit from a bank’s collapse; Hassan, a young Muslim man drifting toward radicalization; Jenni, a lonely Tube driver who escapes into an online virtual world; Gabriel, a barrister; R. Tranter, a poisonous and embittered book reviewer; and a cast of others whose paths cross at a climactic dinner party. The form is consciously Dickensian — a great city anatomized through a cross-section of its inhabitants — and the ambition is to diagnose a society addicted to abstraction, speculation, and screens, where value has detached from anything real.

Faulks Against Type

For readers who know Faulks primarily through Birdsong and his other historical fiction, A Week in December is a striking departure: a contemporary social satire in the tradition of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, trading the trenches of the First World War for the trading floors and dinner parties of modern London. The book is at its strongest in its financial material — the portrait of John Veals’s amoral brilliance and the mechanics of the trade he constructs are genuinely chilling, and they read, with hindsight, as an uncannily accurate dissection of the culture that produced the crash. The novel is more uneven in its other threads, particularly the radicalization subplot, and Faulks’s habit of interconnecting his characters can feel schematic. But as a portrait of a particular city at a particular hinge moment — the last days before the financial certainties of an era collapsed — it is sharp, ambitious, and frequently very funny. For readers interested in fiction about money, modern London, or the social novel as a form, it is a rewarding and revealing read.

Themes

The thematic concerns of A Week in December give it weight beyond its surface narrative. The 2008 financial crisis was not an accident — it was the predictable consequence of incentive structures that rewarded short-term extraction over long-term stability. Radicalisation is not simply ideological — it fills a void created by social disconnection. The state-of-England novel must risk being reductive to say anything — Faulks takes that risk with varying success. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Sebastian Faulks’s prose in A Week in December is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The radicalisation subplot is the weakest element — handled with less precision than the economic material. The interconnections between characters can feel contrived. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of Faulks’s other work and anyone interested in pre-2008 London and its financial culture.

Ultimately, A Week in December is best valued as a vivid time capsule of a society on the eve of upheaval — a panoramic, ambitious, sometimes uneven novel that captures the mood of a particular London moment with real acuity. Its financial portraiture alone justifies the read, and its willingness to attempt the big social-novel form, with all the risks that entails, makes it one of the more interesting departures in Sebastian Faulks’s varied career. Readers who enjoy the Dickensian ambition of the multi-stranded city novel will find much to admire, even where the strands are uneven.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — A state-of-England novel that succeeds in its financial portrait and is less sure in its other threads.

Reading Guides

• Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks — Full Review
• The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst — Full Review