Books in Brief

High Latitudes, by James Buchan (Farrar, Straus, 192 pp., $22)

I HAVEN’T done a stroke of work since I came upon High Latitudes yesterday afternoon. Buchan, a former correspondent for the Financial Times of London, puts his knowledge of the world of international finance at the service of a deeply assured, mesmeric style, as if Faulkner had undertaken to rewrite Paul Erdman or Jeffrey Archer on a bet (and won). High Latitudes explores the intertwined stories of the brilliant and aristocratic Johnny Bellarmine, about to be ruined by unfunded insurance liabilities at Lloyd’s, and Jane Haddon, a textiles CEO up from nowhere by dint of sheer brains and hard work. Between them moves Stephen Cohen, a rich and insecure investment banker in love, somehow, with both of them. Scenes of dealmaking in the City of London and the canyons of Manhattan alternate with breathtaking episodes in the American Northwest, where Stephen goes to examine the oil spill that threatens the solvency of Lloyd’s, and Bellarmine, Alaska, where Johnny seeks himself in the spirit of a great navigator-ancestor who sailed in search of the Northwest Passage two hundred years before, and left his name to a pioneer town. Elliptical in the best sense, Buchan drops us into his narrative in medias res again and again, forcing us to build and rebuild the context for his swift-changing scenes as we read, bringing his world to life around us. Marrying the pace of a financial thriller with the social breadth and assurance of a Galsworthy novel, Buchan assembles a rich and tragic tableau of an England caught between the old and the new, the whole undergirded with a deeply traditional sense of the integrity of narrative that guarantees as rich a reward for our efforts as Buchan deserves for his own.

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Mitt Beauchesne

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High Latitudes, by James Buchan (Farrar, Straus, 192 pp., $22)

I HAVEN’T done a stroke of work since I came upon High Latitudes yesterday afternoon. Buchan, a former correspondent for the Financial Times of London, puts his knowledge of the world of international finance at the service of a deeply assured, mesmeric style, as if Faulkner had undertaken to rewrite Paul Erdman or Jeffrey Archer on a bet (and won). High Latitudes explores the intertwined stories of the brilliant and aristocratic Johnny Bellarmine, about to be ruined by unfunded insurance liabilities at Lloyd’s, and Jane Haddon, a textiles CEO up from nowhere by dint of sheer brains and hard work. Between them moves Stephen Cohen, a rich and insecure investment banker in love, somehow, with both of them. Scenes of dealmaking in the City of London and the canyons of Manhattan alternate with breathtaking episodes in the American Northwest, where Stephen goes to examine the oil spill that threatens the solvency of Lloyd’s, and Bellarmine, Alaska, where Johnny seeks himself in the spirit of a great navigator-ancestor who sailed in search of the Northwest Passage two hundred years before, and left his name to a pioneer town. Elliptical in the best sense, Buchan drops us into his narrative in medias res again and again, forcing us to build and rebuild the context for his swift-changing scenes as we read, bringing his world to life around us. Marrying the pace of a financial thriller with the social breadth and assurance of a Galsworthy novel, Buchan assembles a rich and tragic tableau of an England caught between the old and the new, the whole undergirded with a deeply traditional sense of the integrity of narrative that guarantees as rich a reward for our efforts as Buchan deserves for his own.