Skin in the Game

by Tomas Byrne

(Cameron Publicity & Marketing, £12.99)

“POWERFUL forces in society want only one thing — abject, servile characters, a stagnant pool of weaklings cowed by the fear of heresy, afraid to confront the truth.” From that single sentence, you can see that Skin in the Game is a very superior thriller and an anti-capitalist one at that.

The book’s title refers to when  investment companies demonstrate serious backing for a new funding venture by sharing some of the risk and putting up a percentage of the capital itself. But, of course, the only real risk-takers are ordinary, powerless citizens.

The book  employs many of the conventions of the genre — there’s some perfunctory dialogue, a hyper-real description of places to  compensate for the flat and embryonic interior lives of many of its characters and the usual ragbag cast ofhonest(ish) law enforcers and their brutal counterparts.

Yet Tomas Byrne’s debut novel transcends these basic requirements by revealing the complex mutualised web of interests that allows privatised armies, global investment houses, conniving Western governments and terror groups to call the metaphorical and actual shots in the modern world.

Oscillating between events a few months apart, the book centres around Joe Hawkins, a US terrorism expert who has retired from frontline work to take up an academic post at Oxford. Chapters alternate between his dangerous quest to investigate the disappearance and then murder of his investement banker brother and a British-run interrogation facility where complicit spooks seek to pharmacologically torture Hawkins into madness and amnesia.

Byrne adroitly manages the tension and confusion as the conspiracy to flood a Central Asian republic with dodgy investments and military hardware is slowly revealed.

The novel really gains momentum once Hawkins escapes from his confinement and seeks to expose the whole multi-layered corruption of the deal.

 Byrne, an ex-lawyer and ex-banker turned novelist, is probably no Marxist. 

But this entertaining and informed account of how globalised capitalism is little more than corporate terror that stops at nothing to realise the maximum returns to the minimum number of people, regardless of the human cost, is a good start — especially for those naive progressives who still have not understood the leviathan ranged against us.

PAUL SIMON