Stone’s Fall

"I’m going to confess right away that this is a novel written by my husband. The reason I chose it is that I know it so well and that he would be the first to say that much of it was taken from ideas that I have been thinking about for the last 25 years, and which he had rendered in fictional form. Stone’s Fall starts off in London and then it goes back in time, first to the crisis at Barings Bank in Paris in the 1890s and then to Venice in the 1860s, prior to Italian unification. What the book shows is the enveloping crisis of World War I and its European-wide context, hence the three countries it’s set in. Above all, it really reflects long and deeply on the underside of the fin de siècle and the Belle Epoque. We have mutual protagonists, John Stone himself and, ultimately, his wife Elizabeth. They are both in business. She is first a spy and then an elegant courtesan, with all her illustrious so-called “shareholders”, who support her in extreme elegance in Paris – in other words each day one of the “shareholders” pays for the sexual favours and cultural cultivation that she can bestow. John Stone is an industrialist modelled on the great armaments manufacturer Basil Zaharoff, whose wealth and influence was so enormous it was said to have had an important impact on the foreign policy of many European states. What he did was sell arms to a number of countries, thereby triggering an arms race in which he could never be the loser. I can’t tell you the ending because that would spoil the story, but only by following it to the novel’s climax do we find out that Stone’s fall is all about the question of degeneration and primal transgression. At the end of the 19th century people became obsessed with hereditary degeneration, a naturalised vision of the Christian belief that the sins of the fathers would be revisited on the sons. In the book these questions of degeneration and transgression are interwoven into the most intimate aspects of the protagonists’ lives, above all Stone, who thinks that with the calm manoeuvrings of capital he can control the diverse elements of his empire like so many strings of a marionette. He is deluded in this fantasy of control. There are forces of attraction towards sexual violence and violence more generally that lead to his downfall. The greatest transgression in the novel is World War I itself – the ultimate transgression that leads to the unleashing of new technological weapons on European populations."