1972 expulsion of Uganda\u2019s Asian population under Idi Amin<\/a> and the reinvention of those refugees in late-Thatcherite Britain
\nThe cocaine-soaked first decade of the deregulated City and the arrival of \u201cAmericanised\u201d banking
\nThe post-Soviet wealth transfer and the London property binge that followed it
\nThe strange lineage of Mayfair\u2019s private-members clubs, from John Aspinall\u2019s menagerie to Robin Birley\u2019s bow-tied fiefdoms
\nThe fate of a Rabbi\u2019s grandson in a neighbourhood where the new currency had become purely transactional<\/p>\nEach detour earns its place. Keefe refuses to treat the Brettlers as a case study; he treats them as people inside a city that has rearranged itself around them, often without them noticing.<\/p>\n
The Boy Who Would Be Oligarch<\/h3>\n
Spoilers stay off-limits here, but the book\u2019s emotional engine is Zac himself. In different hands he could have been a case file; in Keefe\u2019s, he is a fully peopled presence. Funny, quick, a mimic with a photographic memory for consumer electronics and sports statistics, a boy who sat at Annabel\u2019s pretending to be a Kazakh heir while his mother thought he was revising for A-levels. Keefe assembles him slowly, by interview and inference, and the result is neither a victim narrative nor a cautionary tale. It is something more honest: a portrait of a teenager caught between the bourgeois inheritance of his Jewish refugee grandparents and the predatory glitter of the city around him.<\/p>\n
The book is at its most affecting when it asks what, if anything, parents are supposed to do with a child who has decided to become somebody else.<\/p>\n
Where the Book Stumbles<\/h3>\n
For all the craft on display, the ambition of London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe occasionally strains its seams. A few places where the book is less sure-footed:<\/p>\n
The middle chapters, which alternate between the glacial police inquiry and a long Shamji family biography, can feel crowded. Readers who came for the Thames mystery may find the Ugandan detour, however beautifully written, a temporary holding pattern.
\nSome secondary figures, a handful of Zac\u2019s schoolmates, several tangential businessmen, a financier or two, are rendered with a reporter\u2019s thoroughness but without always earning their narrative keep.
\nKeefe\u2019s decision, declared in his Note on Sources, to mirror the Brettlers\u2019 own sequence of misapprehension is intellectually honest but does create frustration in the back half, when a reader may wish the camera would simply pull back and deliver verdicts.
\nThe two antagonists, Akbar Shamji and \u201cIndian Dave,\u201d are fascinating on the page but remain slightly flattened. Neither could be fully interviewed, and that absence is felt in the book\u2019s shape.<\/p>\n
None of this is fatal. These are the costs of doing difficult reporting about people who are still alive and still litigious. They are simply the reasons the book falls just short of the near-perfection of Say Nothing.<\/p>\n
What This Book Actually Is<\/h3>\n
It is worth saying, plainly, what London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe is and is not. It is not a procedural whodunit with a clean final act. And it is not an anti-oligarch polemic, though the politics are present and sharp. It is a grieving parents\u2019 book with the bones of investigative journalism underneath, and an argument that a city which sells everything, including its own credulity, produces particular kinds of deaths. The title plays on the old nursery rhyme and on the idea of a capital that keeps finding new ways to lose its footing.<\/p>\n
If You Liked These, Pick This Up<\/h3>\n
London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe will reward readers of:<\/p>\n
Empire of Pain<\/em> and Say Nothing<\/em>, by the same author, for the investigative scope and moral weight
\nButler to the World<\/em> by Oliver Bullough, for its anatomy of London\u2019s role as the world\u2019s laundry
\nPutin\u2019s People<\/em> by Catherine Belton, for the Russian-money backdrop that framed Zac\u2019s impersonation
\nBillion Dollar Whale<\/em> by Bradley Hope and Tom Wright, for the lonely fantasist at the centre of a wealth fraud
\nKleptopia<\/em> by Tom Burgis, for the wider picture of how stolen fortunes find respectable homes
\nLondongrad<\/em> by Mark Hollingsworth and Stewart Lansley, which Keefe himself draws on<\/p>\nThe Verdict Without Quite Delivering One<\/h3>\n
What lingers, days after finishing, is less the mystery than a line Keefe borrows from Andrew Solomon: that parenthood catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger<\/a>. That is the book\u2019s quiet thesis. Zac Brettler was a stranger, in the end, even to the people who loved him best, and the city he lived in helped keep him that way. London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe does not solve him. It listens to the people who tried, and it makes a cold, careful case against the London that swallowed him.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the early hours of November 29, 2019, a surveillance camera mounted on the headquarters of Britain\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service captured a slender figure pacing the balcony of a lit flat across the Thames. The young man paused at one corner, crossed to the other, returned to the middle, and jumped. What followed, and what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6127"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}