The History of the System

In 2005, Faris Mendes sat down to write a novel that might have something to say about the modern world. It was the year of the London terrorist attacks, riots in France, and Hurricane Katrina. Events and situations changed quickly, and satellite coverage moved just as fast to keep up. Before he had even begun writing, the novel already felt behind the times, and he wondered if the format was the ideal way to articulate his ideas.

He faced a similar torment to that which Jonathan Franzen described his Perchance to Dream essay, questioning the status (or usefulness) of the novel in contemporary society, and its inadequacy for analysis of the flaws of mass culture when the culture itself thrives on the cult of the new and has so little time to read. The time it takes to craft a social novel is so long that the aspects of modernity he wanted to mock will have moved on and made his work almost nostalgic. Like Franzen, Mendes was in a state of deep despair when he tried to make a start on his third novel, and seriously doubted he had the energy to write it, or that the world had the time or inclination to read it.

“Obviously, after his long lament, Franzen then saved the world with The Corrections,” says Mendes, “so maybe a thorough moan about things is a good way for a writer to take stock of his inspiration.”

We’re being served teppanyaki in a City restaurant tucked away in a lane behind the Bank of England. Mendes easily fits in with the ultra-groomed workers of the financial sector, looking nothing at all like a novelist worried about the future of the written word.

“Although, I agree with him about the distractions of modern technology. It’s like everyone just snacks now, instead of ever sitting down to a meal. Intellectually, I mean.”

Famously, Mendes does not really mix with the literary scene at all, even though his first novel The Asset Strippers was widely praised by critics, and his second, The Perfect Man, appeared on the shortlist for the Costa prize.

“It’s because I’m rich,” he says when I ask why it’s difficult to find a contemporary novelist with a good word to say about him. “I was born into a wealthy family, had privileged opportunities and an expensive education, and don’t need to earn money from the books at all. That doesn’t fit with how writers ought to be, according to the legions of struggling graduates of creative writing programs.”

Mendes’ parents both worked in banking, his American mother meeting his father while working in London during the excesses of the 1980s before they were able to retire to houses and apartments throughout the world, the occasional act of lavish charity ensuring their peers remained transfixed by their lifestyle. Faris was educated at Marlborough before going up to Cambridge, and spent some years on a London commodities exchange before deciding to see the world. He spent the next three years on a very grand Grand Tour, visiting many of the world’s most fashionable hotels and parties, until an epiphany stopped him in his tracks.

“People have compared it to how the prince Siddhartha was divested of his illusions about life. The rich boy is confronted by the sheer volume of misery in the world. That’s not exactly what happened - it was more to do with a near overdose and a bad break-up. But the result was broadly the same, in that a certain emptiness began to haunt me. The first thing I did was sign up for an MBA.”

It is said that while at Cambridge for a philosophy degree, Mendes devoted almost all his time to a study of the work of Talcott Parsons. He claims to have rarely attended any lectures or seminars required for his course, and when not partying, spent most of his time rereading The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action, even though these works were outside the scope of his undergraduate program. Despite the narrow focus of his university education, he was still awarded a first.

“There’s something so much more fascinating about theories of autopoietic systems than the pedantry of formal logic and the morality of impossible situations. Structural functionalism just lets everything fall into place - it’s a wonderfully affirming experience. There is it, the answer to everything. Everything explained in terms of its function, pretty much the way evolutionary theory is able to explain the tapestry of life in the simple terms of natural selection. Invigorating.”

His time on the trading floor was unremarkable. Colleagues report that he showed no aptitude for commodities exchanges or insights into the market. He admits he was only there because of the extreme partying that accompanies the high pressure work culture, and was really only following an expected career trajectory. After four years, he realised he could continue the hedonism while journeying through Asia and Australasia, and did so until he was stopped in his tracked by the moment of self-doubt.

“It was during the MBA that I first got the urge to write,” he says. “At first, just to amuse myself. If you’re spending any amount of time studying the global economic system, you’ll start to pick out patterns. It’s like a puzzle, and I’d soon cobbled together the plot of my first book, just from methodologically working through different outcomes from the economic policies of Western governments from the 1980s onward. It turned into a detective novel, with forensic auditors instead of troubled police detectives.”

Mendes’ first novel, The Asset Strippers, took a strangely sympathetic yet satirical look at the privatisation programs of various Western nations during the late 20th century, viewed from the perspective of a group of accountants trying to work out the true fate of public assets. Its unusual style proved popular with critics, and it spawned a few imitations in the ‘fiscal thriller’ genre. It was Gordon Brown’s book of the year for 1998.

“The second novel came very quickly. I was interested in defining the actor in an economic system, stripping away the particulars of time and place and placing him within the action system of the marketplace. We make such assumptions about this character when talking about economics, and I thought he ought to be brought to life. I was seeking to document life within an economic system without the noise of morality that ruins most novelists’ work.”

The Perfect Man, published in 2003, was about the perfection of humanity under the capitalist system. It was a detailed depiction of a human being perfected for the system, rather than perfected by any measure of human or spiritual self-realisation. Instead, we find a man perfectly integrated into the consumer capitalist economy, where every urge and desire, hope and fear, regret and consolation was channelled through commodification and realised via economic activity. Many thought the novel was a further advance into satire, but Mendes asserts that it is meant as an honest and graphic portrayal of modern man in his true habitat, the marketplace.

Then, in 2005, Mendes admits he foundered. While The Perfect Man was being lauded by critics and nominated for awards, he wondered if he had reached the limits of the novel to articulate his ideas. In an essay published in Monocle, he wrote that he had realised we are at the very end of the romantic age, as characterised by the idea that human beings are the main focus of our concern. Now we value systems and the understanding of systems without any sympathy for the utterly redundant human species. As a unit of understanding in this new perspective, we have the entirely rational being as depicted in The Perfect Man. Dwelling on the idiosyncrasies and personal histories of individual actors within the marketplace was a waste of time, as these could be understood in aggregate now that ‘big data’ was available and able to add to our understanding of systems. The novel, he wrote, was a dead form, since it persisted with the idea of humans as the focus of attention.

“Yes, like Franzen I announced my pessimism in a whiney essay, and this kind of led to a breakthrough in my writing. Franzen was bemoaning the options for the social novelist, I was concerned with the ability of writers to describe the economic system. I think around that time, Talcott Parsons came back to influence me in a big way. You have to remember that I wrote the essay in 2005, really the eve of social media and all the real time technology that has resulted in big data. Facebook started in 2004, Twitter in 2006. Once you have this so-called big data, you no longer need to focus on the single actors within the system, as you can discern aggregate behaviour and trends without once having to mention a name. Dealt with in aggregate, social actors act in similar, predictable ways, they are easily manipulated by social forces. Their internalisation of socialisation processes mean that when they pursue their ‘free will’ they are in fact conforming to social norms and serving the functional requirements of the economy.”

Like Mendes’ work, Franzen’s The Corrections dealt with the economic system, the title referring to a reevaluation of financial markets following the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century. However, while Franzen’s novel concentrates on the fate of a family within that economic system, there are no characters in Mendes’ latest novel The History of the System. It is being described as the first Big Data novel - with no individual characters, only statistical interpretations and trends that result from actions within the social system. The novel includes a lot of maths and regression analyses, and several hundred pages of graphical footnotes and sources.

“People are bored of the narrow confines of the single human, now there is a social mind and social thoughts. This is our focus of understanding now, and it is a requirement that novelists and artists adapt to the changing perspective that the species has for understanding itself. To dwell in morality, as pretty much all novelists seem to, is futile. We have reached a position in history where individual human actions are too small and meaningless to matter, so morality is redundant. Only when these individual social actions are dealt with in aggregate do they contain any meaning.”

The History of the System took 10 years to write, and Mendes admits it was a difficult journey. Several drafts of the novel contained actual characters, but describing their actions, their inner lives and their relationships created too much noise, according to Mendes, and made it difficult to create the functionalist perspective the author wanted. Once these characters and their human-scale concerns were removed, the novel fell into place. Within the narrative of the novel, characters are replaced with the social actor that Mendes had described in The Perfect Man.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’m wealthy, a member of the 1% you might say, that I’ve been able to take this innovative approach in my fiction. Rich people are much more able to abstract their thinking to understand social and economic systems. They are able to attain a much more objective view of these interdependent systems because they are not trapped in the milieu of their struggle, as the 99% are. Down at that level, in the mire of individual striving, you have a severely biased perspective, you cannot transcend your own subjectivity at all. So that’s all you should expect from an artist or writer at that level - varieties of subjectivity. Noise, in other words.”

Mendes has the supreme confidence of the City workers when it comes to the end of the meal and settling the bill. There is no uncertainty in the way he handles interactions with his hosts, and he concludes the interview just as confidently, stating that he has other commitments. The History of the System will be published in February.