An African Millionaire

"This is a really fun novel, almost a set of short stories—strung together like diamonds in a necklace. It’s about a British millionaire called Charles Vandrift, who made his money in South African diamond mines, and is now a financier. He’s very wealthy but has clearly earned this wealth through corrupt and colonialist practices. The short stories are all about Vandrift being repeatedly swindled, hoodwinked, cheated by the same antagonist, a shapeshifting con artist called Colonel Clay. In every single story, Clay wins and Vandrift loses. To Vandrift, the amounts are small, but to anyone reading the book these are life-changing sums of money that Clay is shearing off his targeted sheep. “In Wharton’s books, wealth functions as a heavy cloth, a prophylactic stopping people from understanding each other’s true feelings” It makes you realise that these questions were being asked back in 1897. Vandrift goes a little mad with confusion over this punishment being visited on him by a seemingly omnipotent and omniscient enemy, but he has a twinge of moral improvement as the stories go on. They’re mostly just fun, though. There’s another moral point being drawn quite carefully here—it shows a lot of people being compromised. The narrator is the millionaire’s secretary; at one point early on in the book, the secretary tries to chisel some money out of his boss without the boss knowing by claiming a little side commission on a piece of work he’s doing. It turns out that the person he’s dealing with is the mysterious Colonel Clay who now has compromising material on him… so it’s about the power of money to corrupt, in that sense. At one point, Clay calls himself a ‘practical socialist,’ because he is engaged in the direct redistribution of money from Vandrift to himself. Exactly like that. Clay’s great gift is disguise. In every chapter, he becomes a new character who meets Vandrift and talks to him. Occasionally Vandrift will spot someone and say, ‘I know you, you’re the Colonel in disguise!’ and attempt to rip off some poor bearded gentleman’s whiskers. It’s really very funny and charming."