What I Am Reading: "A Conspiracy of Paper" by David Liss

While staring down the barrel of another impending economic collapse, I sought escapism in an economic calamity far enough removed in history to render it more fascinating than disturbing. I went looking for a book about the South Sea Bubble, and in the absence of any nonfiction available through online library sorcery, I went with this novel, which came recommended to me.

This book is about Benjamin Weaver, a Jew in early 18th century London who works as a "thief taker" and all-around private detective. He came upon this career route after a stint as a boxer transitioned into work as a general ruffian-for-hire. He lives apart from London's Jewish community at the story’s beginning, but is drawn back into their orbit after a client implies that Benjamin's father's death of a few months earlier, while appearing to be a random accident, was in fact a murder.

This leads Weaver into a web of intrigue involving the economic conflict between the Bank of England and the South Sea Company. Finance, as we conceive of it today, was a new industry at that point, and Benjamin must negotiate shifting alliances and motivations as the Company and the Bank bid for the right to finance government debt, a trade worth millions of pounds (a sum nigh-inconceivable to the protagonists at the time). In many respects, the book reminds me of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, a book that covered (on a much larger scale) the rise of finance, modern science, and the general coming of the modern world in the years between the Restoration and the rise of the House of Hanover. This book even similarly has its protagonist incorporate new philosophical ideas into his operations, in the form of considering probability when assessing motives and courses of action; though this is so familiar to us that it is perhaps hard for the reader to process what an intellectual innovation this is.

The novel is set a bit after the Baroque Cycle, in the 1720s. This is familiar to me as the "age of gin," though I don't think anyone actually calls it that. I was first exposed to this in Colin Wilson's lurid and trashy The History of Murder (yes, I admit it, I read bad books too), which spent a lot of time on the massive British crime wave that resulted from the introduction of gin in the late 17th century. This resulted in all of the lurid spectacles chronicled by William Hogarth in his Beer Street and Gin Lane engravings (below). Similar to the crack epidemic in our own time, the poor were ravaged by addiction and substance abuse, and a crime wave was met by the sort of repressive law enforcement that led to, in gin’s case death penalties for petty theft and other horrific judicial overreach.

Benjamin Weaver moves through this world as he chases leads through grotesque gin taverns, as well as through the new coffee shops where finance is conducted. He also interacts with his own Jewish community, fairly newly reestablished, as the Jews were only let back into England by Oliver Cromwell. Weaver ran away from his father at a fairly young age and established himself as a renegade; yet as he pursues the latter's murderer he moves back in with his uncle in the ghetto and resumes synagogue attendance. Despite his past as a boxer, when he was cheered by Britons despite his Jewishness, he of course feels the impact of the antisemitism in all levels of British society. It comes at him from both from commoners on the streets and in taverns, and from the gentlemen who patronize his business despite their distaste. Out on his own, he was so used to defining himself as a Jew among Britons that he must re-learn how to think of himself as a Jew among Jews. This is illustrated where he fleetingly feels contempt for a "Tudesco" peddler (meaning he was from Eastern Europe), then feels shame for having judged one of his countrymen in this manner.

The book was a good mystery, possible to follow despite many moving parts. They all tied into a bow nicely in the end, though this bow was tied through a revelatory bull session with a major puppetmaster in the final chapter. However, though the book used the South Sea Company and its financial situation (which eventually turned ruinous) as a plot point, the book was not actually about the Bubble itself! It was pre-Bubble, and the plot didn't even fictionally lead to the collapse of the Bubble or anything. I guess if you need history, you should go straight for history. However, there are subsequent books in the Benjamin Weaver series that deal with other issues of 18th century Britain, which I may have to follow up on in the medium-term future. The Baroque Cycle put me on the side of the Whigs, but the next book in the series, about the Walpole Administration, could put me off them.

Beer Street and Gin Lane by William Hogarth, 1751 (Wikimedia Commons).