About the Book

Syllabus

	Introductory Lesson
	Part 1 (60 w) p. 1-14 p. 14-25 p. 25-45 Quiz, summary
	Part 2 (60 w) p. 46-62 p. 62-69
	p. 70-86 p. 86-98 Quiz, summary
	Part 3 (60 w) p. 99-105 p. 105-119
	p. 119-131 p.131-142 p. 143-155 Quiz, summary
	Part 4 (30 w) p. 156-169 p. 170-186
	p. 186-208 (30 w)
	p. 208-219 Quiz, summary
	Part 5 (60 w) p. 220-240
	p. 240-245 p. 245-275 Quiz, summary
	Part 6 (30 w) p. 276-288
	p. 288-295 p. 295-313 (30 w)
	p. 313-330 Quiz, summary
	Part 7 (30 w) p.331-353
	p. 353-372 p.373 -378 (30 w)
	p.378-387 p.388-390 Quiz, summary
	Topic, debts

Sebastian Faulks

Biography

Sebastian Faulks was born in Donnington, a village near Newbury in Berkshire on April 20, 1953. He was the younger son of Peter Faulks (1917-1998) and Pamela, née Lawless (1923-2003). Peter Faulks was a partner in the local law firm Pitman and Bazett. He fought in Holland, France, North Africa, Italy, Palestine and Syria. He was awarded the Military Cross in Tunisia. He lived an active life, later sitting as a judge in London and Reading.

Pamela Faulks was the only daughter of Philip Lawless, MC. He had served in the Artists Rifles in the First World War and captained Richmond Rugby Club. He was a sports reporter for The Morning Post and the Daily Telegraph

‘I had a very happy childhood,’ said Faulks. ‘My parents were kind, humorous and affectionate. My brother Edward was a great companion. We only ever met one of our four grandparents. Two of them were dead and my mother was estranged from her own mother. There was a sense that everything was beginning again – a fresh start after the War. Edward and I were both obsessed by ball games, and in the summer we played cricket for about eight hours a days. I was shy, a loner, but quite content. I think the 1950s were a bit austere if you were grown up, but for a child it was a good time, with Hornby trains and Meccano (which I could never master). Then came the Beatles.’

Faulks’s mother introduced her sons to books at a young age. She also took them to the theatre and to galleries in London. ‘She had the full classical canon on vinyl and we absorbed all that, though we were much keener on pop music,’ said Faulks. Later on, Edward had a rock band at school. My father was into books only, I think, not music so much – he liked Trollope, Waugh, Graham Greene. My mother knew all of Dickens backwards. Those characters were real people to her.’

Both brothers were educated at Elstree School near Reading. ‘It was a demanding and old-fashioned school, and we both had to rise to the challenge,’ said Faulks. ‘I liked it very much; it was a formidable education.’ Faulks went as top scholar to Wellington College in 1966 and in 1970 won an open exhibition to read English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1974, and was elected an Honorary Fellow in 2007.

In the year between school and university he had studied in Paris and learned to speak French. After university, he spent a year in Bristol, writing a novel. ‘From the age of about fourteen, I had made up my mind. I was inspired by Dickens and D.H.Lawrence among others. I set my heart on being a novelist at that young age.’ At the end of the year, he migrated to London where he found work teaching in a private school in Camden Town.

After two years, he got a job running a small book club called the New Fiction Society which had been set up by the Arts Council to stimulate sales of literary fiction. He took over from the novelist David Hughes, who became a lifelong friend. In 1979 Faulks joined the staff of Daily Telegraph as the junior reporter on the diary column. ‘I was still writing books in the evening and at weekends,’ said Faulks, ‘but they weren’t much good.’ He had also been given work as freelance book reviewer, first at the Sunday Times, then at the Spectator and Books and Bookmen.

He and Edward had been sharing a house, but went their different ways. ‘I bought a small flat in Notting Hill,’ said Faulks. ‘I had no television and I was meant to just write at night. Eventually, at about the fourth attempt I wrote something publishable. I rang up a publisher called James Michie. I didn’t really know how distinguished James was; he was just someone I’d met at a party. But I later found out he’d published Graham Greene and discovered Sylvia Plath. After some humming he accepted the book, which I called A Trick of the Light. I was twenty-nine. I got the news in a phone booth on Holborn Viaduct. It was a good moment; it felt like the beginning of something at last, after a long and occasionally dispiriting apprenticeship.’

Faulks worked as a feature writer for the Sunday Telegraph from 1983 to 1986, when he went to join the Independent as Literary Editor

In 1989, he married Veronica Youlten, formerly his assistant on the Independent books pages, later an editor at the Independent magazine. They have three children: William (born 1990), Holly (born 1992) and Arthur (born 1996).

Sebastian Faulks was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1993 and appointed CBE for services to literature in 2002. The Tavistock Clinic in association with the University of East London awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the understanding of psychiatry in Human Traces.

Task 1. Study the following words and expressions and give their definitions:

be estranged from smb, to rise to the challenge, an Honorary Member, a lifelong friend

MC, Artist Rifles, the Morning Post, the Daily Telegraph, Hornby trains, Meccano

Task 2. Read Sebastian Faulk’s biography and answer the following questions:

(1) What can you say about Faulks' parents, their background?

(2) What interests did the brothers have in their childhood?

(3) How does Sebastian Faulks describe his childhood?

(4) What education did the brothers have?

(5) How did the literary career of Faulks start? What posts did he have?

(6) Who became Faulks’ best friend?

(7) What do you get to know about the present life of Sebastian Faulks?

(8) What honours does he have?

About the Book

A Week in December, Sebastian Faulks’s tenth novel, came out in September 2009 to considerable press attention. Much of it focused on his attempt to write a ‘state of the nation’ book at a time of economic meltdown and admired the ambition and the execution of the idea.

Faulks began with the intention of writing what he called a ‘modern Dickensian novel’, one in which characters from different walks of life were linked by initially unseen connections and in which London itself played an important part.

(1) Read some information about the main characters and try to give a short profile about them.

The main characters are:

· John Veals, a hedge fund manager, and his son, Finbar;

The character of John Veals demonstrates how gigantic profits can be made legally from inside information if the financier has no ethical sense. In the course of the week in question Veals builds a position based on the likelihood of a run on a traditional bank. The run will happen when Veals makes known the existence of a particular document he has surreptitiously obtained from a cleaner (in fact, a woman in his pay) in the bank’s head office.

‘Veals was difficult to get right because he is essentially one-dimensional,’ said Faulks. ‘That’s the whole point of bankers and financiers like him. They are, as his wife says, “functionally autistic”, with no interest in any aspect of life beyond hypothetical profit. For nuance of character, you have to look elsewhere. But of course it’s the sheer monomania that makes a man like Veals quite fascinating.’

· Hassan al-Rashid, a student, and his father, known as Knocker;

Hassan al-Rashid, meanwhile, is a Scottish student at a dingy university on London’s south bank, who is exploited by Muslim extremists, to the extent that he is prepared to take part in a terrorist bomb plot. Faulks gives a sympathetic account of the attractions of an all-embracing belief system to a young man confused by conflicting cultural demands. ‘I was trying to understand how someone as ironic and as British as Hassan could be so badly led astray. After all, he’s a Kilmarnock supporter. The Yorkshire bombers of 7/7 were obviously in my mind.’

· Jenni Fortune, a Tube train driver; Gabriel Northwood, a barrister;

Gabriel Northwood, the barrister, is involved in a civil action about an attempted suicide on the London Underground, a case that also involves the driver Jenni Fortune. Both have an addiction to a virtual world — he to a lost lover and she to an internet game called Parallax – that they must lose before they are free to understand what hope for the future the other may hold out. John Veals’s son, Finbar, meanwhile, is addicted to genetically modified skunk and to a reality show on television called ‘It’s Madness’. A nervous breakdown lands Finbar in the same psychiatric hospital as Gabriel’s brother Adam – a hospital that is the intended target of Hassan’s terrorist attack.

· R. Tranter, a hack journalist

Some gossip articles continued to treat it as a roman à clef, with the character of R.Tranter inviting particular speculation from fellow-journalists. The most frequently mentioned ‘model’, however, was discovered to be married with children, living in the countryside, while Tranter lives alone with a cat in the invented suburb of Ferrers End.

(2) Translate the following extract:

‘For some time,’ said Faulks, ‘I had been aware of people I occasionally met making five or ten million pounds a year for what appeared to be no more than making bets with other people’s money or “OPM” as they dismissively called it. The profits were theirs to keep with minimal tax, while any losses, because their operations were underwritten by high street banks, were for the taxpayer to shoulder. This seemed to me the greatest con trick ever perpetrated on the British public. It was embarrassing that it had been so enthusiastically embraced by a Labour government. When Gordon Brown opened Lehman Brothers office in Canary Wharf, he said, “What you have done for the City of London, I intend to do for the British economy.” And he did.’

(Make bets – заключать пари, делать ставки; ‘OPM’ – Other People's Money – заемные средства; Dismissively – пренебрежительно; Underwritten- нижеизложенный; Be to shoulder- быть в тесном сотрудничестве, единении; Con trick- мошенничество, обман; Perpetrate – совершать, творить; Embrace – воспользоваться; Lehman Brothers office- "Леман Бразерс" (крупная финансовая корпорация, осуществляющая широкий спектр операций и известная своими инновациями в сфере финансового менеджмента); Canary Wharf - башня Канэри-Уорф (административное высотное здание в Лондонском портовом районе [London Docklands ]; построено в 1991; высота 244 м))

(3) What happened to the primary plot of the novel? What was the reason for this?

The book was begun at the height of the boom and was not intended to be a novel of the crash. However, as the banking collapse approached, Faulks decided to shorten the time scale of the book, to squeeze it down into a week and locate it at the last minute that it was still possible to believe the good times would never end: December 2007. This involved considerable rewriting, Faulks admitted. ‘The new tight time scale, seven days, seven chapters, gave me urgency and structure, but it played havoc with developing relationships, which just don’t grow that fast. I had to sort all that out so the reader didn’t need to worry about it. It was technically very fiddly, but I hope that doesn’t show.’ The book ends with a series of reverses and resolutions, some unforeseen, some reassuring and some chilling.

The book was well received by reviewers, who praised its seriousness, its topicality and its scathing satirical humour. While most of the press attention was extremely positive, some journalists attempted to find real-life models for the characters in the book – a quest Faulks described at the time as ‘puerile and doomed.’

(4) Study the following reviews and translate them into Russian:

• it ‘could hardly be more timely’, said The Times;
• it is ‘unequivocally successful,’ said the Guardian
• ‘perfectly constructed’, according to the Telegraph
• The Independent wrote: ‘Often edgily satirical, sometimes deeply affecting, A Week in December grasps its headline motifs with the strong and supple hands of a master.’

At a literary festival in October 2010, Faulks said, ‘It isn’t really the novel I intended to write. It developed this angry and comic satirical impulse under its own steam. The book I wanted to write, a sort of Dickens meets John Updike, still remains to be written. I enjoyed being in the present day for a change and of course it’s much easier to do, with far less checking of facts. I hope to return to the present for another book, but in more loving, less satirical mode.’

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