Andrew Hunter Murray's Reading List

"It’s a tale as old as time: boy meets girl, boy is wrongly imprisoned for many years, boy escapes, discovers enormous fortune on mysterious Mediterranean island, boy exacts revenge on the people who locked him up in the first place. It was a lockdown read for me: it’s 1200 closely-typed pages, and surprisingly thrilling given how long it is. Dumas really manages to sustain great excitement for lots of the book. It’s interesting when you get these huge 19th-century authors who are writing by the pound, by the ten million words. It’s easy to be daunted by it—I think I was daunted for a long time before I read it. But then I started… At the start, Edmond Dantès is such a sweet pleasant young man; you feel for him so much when he’s unfairly locked away. It’s a complete set-up, he’s done nothing wrong. All the scenes in prison are very exciting, then he discovers this huge fortune, becomes the Count of Monte Cristo, and is rocketed into a completely different sphere of human existence. He becomes frightening. The interesting thing in the second half of the book is seeing the net being skilfully drawn tighter and tighter around the people who locked him up, who made him suffer for so many years. Dumas really skilfully creates suspense over just how far the Count is willing to go in his vengeance mission. You have the sense that everyone is being punished towards the end—but not you, the reader, because it’s very exciting. Yes, it’s really fun. Also a bit fantastical. When Dantès arrives on the mysterious island that contains the secret hole packed full of treasure, it’s insanely over-described. When he gets in there, the walls are practically coated in gold, there are chests full of treasure everywhere. It’s the fantasy of winning the EuroMillions when you haven’t even bought a ticket. It’s insane how ludicrously wealthy he suddenly becomes. The exciting thing is how he transforms huge casks of jewels and diamonds into a stable future for himself, given that he’s a nobody. He’s poor, he’s escaped from prison. If anyone finds out about this, then he’s dead. They’ll just kill him and take the money. So it’s a very exciting transformation process: he goes into the cocoon as Edmond Dantès and comes out a count. Exactly that. And Dantès is such a sweet boy, and the Count is such a cruel and distant man. It’s almost impossible to believe it’s the same person. But that sense of the complexity of wealth is in almost all novels about wealth."

"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."

"I think of Wharton as Jane Austen a century on. She’s not afraid to punch a bit harder. Her novels are not romances in the sense that Austen’s are, although both are set in a certain wealthy layer of society, and where the question is whether people are going to form happy relationships or not. They’re not comic romances; Wharton’s novels are more tragic than that. A lot of her books are set in 1870s New York, when some enormous fortunes have been made, where New York is still under construction, and the balance of power is shifting between old money and new. That’s a fabulous motor for fiction: a society in flux. And the great thing about Wharton is that she was part of this world, she grew up in it. She’s writing anthropological work about her own people. The Age of Innocence is about a young man called Newland Archer. He’s engaged to someone that I think it is fair to call ‘a perfectly nice girl.’ She’s called May, she’s lovely, and she’s absolutely a paid-up member of the society they are both in. At the start of the novel, May’s cousin Countess Ellen Olenska returns from Europe—which, in Wharton’s novels, is always a site of potential danger and excitement. Newland encounters her for the first time at the opera. Then he hears she’s potentially engaged in a divorce. So there’s an element of scandal about her. He befriends her because of his fiancé’s connection to her, and then he falls in love with her. She’s just as wealthy as any of the members of this society, but she’s not part of it. She doesn’t accept its strictures. Plus he falls totally in love with her while already being engaged to her cousin. So it’s a magnificent romantic tragedy. Wharton isn’t afraid to give her characters unhappy or complicated endings. In The Age of Innocence and in lots of Wharton’s books, wealth functions as a heavy cloth, a prophylactic stopping people from seeing each other’s hearts and understanding each other’s true feelings. It’s an amazing novel. All of Wharton’s books are brilliant. Well, apart from her ghost stories , which aren’t my favourite. They just aren’t scary. Yes, in a sense everyone is worried about what everyone else has, whether that’s more money or more of any other unexpected asset. People are constantly examining each other. There’s a whole raft of novels, as you say, of old British families marrying into American money, because there aren’t enough funds to keep the big house going. There were a lot of marriages of convenience in the 19th century and the early 20th century, where you might effectively trade a lump of US currency for a title and a country house. But that also leads to complication, because think of a young woman from gilded age New York coming to live in a leaky house in rural Borsetshire… Francis Hodgson Burnett wrote a few books about people trading spouses, steamships carrying young women to be married off on one side of the Atlantic or another. Wharton is very good on that. Her book The House of Mirth is incredible. Ah, it’s incredible. It’s all about Lily Bart trying to find some secure berth for life and marriage, and not quite ever being able to compromise her own brilliant personality to do that. There’s another one called The Custom of the Country , in which Undine Spragg—what a name—a young arriviste from the Midwest, the middle of nowhere, really, who arrives in New York and ruins her parents’ savings to buy her way into high society, and slowly climbs the brutal cliff face towards acceptance in society. But, as you say, she never feels she’s arrived. Even as the novel ends, she’s achieved her greatest financial triumph so far. Then in the very final pages, she spots a tiny bauble someone else has that she doesn’t, and you can already see her starting to plot. It’s an amazing portrayal of the human inability to accept what we have."

"The Shooting Party is a novel set in Edwardian England, and it’s about a small group of people who have gathered on the estate of Sir Randolph. From the very first page, you know that someone dies during the shooting weekend, but you don’t know who it is. Colegate is magnificent at creating atmosphere and drawing character. It’s so realistically done that I assumed it was written in the first years of the 20th century, when in fact it was published in 1980. In a relatively short book, she creates well over a dozen remarkably detailed personalities, all of whom you believe in and all of whom are fascinating. Colegate is so good on character, and on Edwardian society. Because it was a very weird time to be wealthy—there were interesting rules about marriage, and adultery in particular, which was tacitly accepted. Marital relationships seem to have been quite strange in terms of men being mollycoddled and really mothered by their wives; the locus of romantic action was really in affairs. Marriage was seen as important, nice to have, but fundamentally unsexy. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So Colegate fills her books with interesting touches about people’s marriages. For example, at one point someone observes that the host has given a pair of lovers bedrooms nice and close to each other, so that they can discreetly slip along the corridor in the middle of the night. It’s brilliantly and accurately rendered. You want to know what happens to the marriages, you want to know what happens with the shooting party, and this whole world is about to end."

"Yes, this is a book about Thatcherite wealth. I think it’s one of the most brilliant relatively recent novels about money and wealth. None of the book’s characters are quite super-rich, but they are clearly well on their way there. It’s about a family called the Winshaws who are described as—and I’m quoting here—as “the meanest, greediest, cruelest bunch of back-stabbing, penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.” It’s incredible. So, it’s about a young novelist who gets a commission to write a history of the Winshaw family. The family has its hooks into almost every aspect of British life in the 1980s: there’s an art dealer, a very cruel factory farmer, a politician, an arms dealer, a poisonous newspaper columnist. It’s very complicated, because the timelines are fractured, and there are coincidences everywhere. It’s written in quite a postmodern way. But its central depiction of a family on the make, all connected to and helping each other up the greasy pole is very relevant to life in Britain today. They are very Johnsonian, the Winshaws. No. But it’s easy to say that. If someone offered me a chance for a billion quid tomorrow, I’m sure I’d grab it with both greedy mitts. But I don’t think it would make me happier, or aid the development of my life. I don’t think it would help me do the work I love doing, and to improve at that work, which are two of the big elements of finding happiness and satisfaction. It would buy me freedom. That’s the great thing. But the complications that wealth brings seem a pretty big trade-off. I think so."