Sir Jack Pitman, the anti-hero of Julian Barnes's latest novel, is a media magnate, a fraud, a bully. He is a man who likes to take calls while sitting on his porphyry toilet; outside his office is a eulogy to him carved in stone. In short, he is a cigar-chewing clich?, a grotesque caricature of the late Robert Maxwell.
England, England is set in the future. But Barnes's attitude to business is rooted in the past. A hundred and fifty years ago it was all very well for Dickens to create the similarly inhuman character of Dombey, the cruel head of a shipping house. Business was redder in tooth and claw in those days.
We have since moved on. We don't hate capitalists any more. Even the Labour party has re-invented itself as business-friendly, and leading businessmen are among some of the most trusted visitors to 10 Downing Street.
Yet the remarkable thing about England, England is not that its businessman is a monster. It is that he is a businessman at all. In choosing to set part of his novel in the beech-and-ash, glass-and-steel Pitman House, Barnes has done something unusual for a modern British writer. Business has become an area into which British novelists no longer venture. The campus, the police, politics, journalism and the dole queues all feature often enough in 20th-century fiction. But business-almost never.
This seems a peculiar omission when business is so rich in all the big human themes. After all, most people spend much of their lives engaged in business of some sort and there find sources of pleasure, ambition, frustration, competition, greed and envy.
Chaucer had no inhibition when it came to writing about these things: the son of a merchant, he was no stranger to the profit motive and the effect it had on people. For Shakespeare, too, merchants were as much part of the mix as kings and wenches.
More recently, George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad have written about business, but in the last 50 years there has been a great silence on the subject. One of the exceptions is David Lodge's Nice Work. Vic Wilcox, the hero, is the manager of an engineering company in the Midlands who falls for Robyn Penrose, an English academic. The book is about how needlessly separate their two worlds are.
Lodge is right. The problem is one of ignorance-most writers know nothing of the business world, and feel inhibited about discovering anything. While most other people seem to have shed their prejudices about business, in the literary world the old snobberies about commerce live on. This sometimes takes a left-wing guise, but that too is out of date. The average boss of a big British company is less like Jack Pitman and more like David Simon, the intellectually sophisticated, passionately pro-European, former BP boss who now works for a Labour government.
The blame does not all lie with the novelists. Business people are equally at fault for not making what they do more accessible, more attractive, more a part of mainstream culture. And while novelists do not venture outside their little boxes, neither do business people. When was the last time you saw a businessman or woman on Question Time, or heard one on the radio talking about an issue that he or she believed in?
This reticence means that we hardly have any business figures that anyone has heard of. It is not just that ordinary people are unable to name any-senior executives themselves cannot tell you who runs Marks & Spencer, let alone say anything about him. If you press them for names of business leaders they will come up with Richard Branson, Anita Roddick, John Harvey-Jones and-if you are lucky-Lord Hanson. And that will be it.
Compare this to the US, where business is an accepted part of ordinary life, where there are business heroes. There, novelists treat the world of business casually-there is no mystique, it is simply a part of society to be dealt with like any other. In Richard Ford's best-seller, Independence Day the hero is an estate agent-his failed attempts to sell houses are described in the same sort of way as his failed attempts at getting through to his adolescent son.
This ease with business themes does not mean that US writers accept it uncritically. Think of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, or David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross. Each of these works has something real to say about the subject: about the brutal and brutalising pressures of being a bond trader or salesman.
In the US a book has just been published which argues that managers have much to learn from literature. Written by Robert A Brawer (an ex-English professor as well as the ex-chief executive of Maidenform, the bra company), Fictions of Business instructs managers to read the works of writers such as Arthur Miller, Joseph Heller and Mark Twain. He says the lessons to be learnt there are more profound than in any management primer.
But literature can benefit from business too, or at least draw upon it. Cut off from one of the most dynamic (and progressive) aspects of national life, no wonder that so much modern British fiction seems rather anaemic.
