No one could accuse Alexander Starritt of being a one-trick pony. The Scottish-German writer’s three novels to date span a curious range of topics: in his debut, The Beast (2017), he drew on his time as a headline-writer and journalist to satirise – but also lionise – the frenzied world of tabloid journalism; his highly acclaimed follow-up, We Germans (2020), presented the posthumous confessions of a German soldier who had fought on the Eastern Front during the Second World War. Now Drayton and Mackenzie, Starritt’s longest and most ambitious effort so far, swerves off in a different direction altogether, tracking the evolving friendship of two men, James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie, against the backdrop of some of the major events of the 21st century.

The set-up is relatively familiar. James is the neurotic genius – a workaholic, socially inept, bored by the intellectual inferiority of his peers at school and then at Oxford, to the extent that the only way he can console himself is ‘by imagining that he was competing not against the students around him but against the best student from every cohort back through Oxford’s nine centuries’. Roland, a fellow undergraduate, is a people person – charming, sociable, lazy – who becomes obsessed with Japan in his final year and, instead of studying for his exams, flies to Tokyo on a whim to interview a yakuza boss. Neither character cares much about the other during their time at university, the only point of contact being the rowing team. But a few years on, at a pub in central London, James, who is overpaid, under-stimulated and ‘not meshing’ with his colleagues in his job at McKinsey, bumps into Roland, who has just returned from a stint teaching at a school in Nagaur, India. 

At first, they are not drawn to one another, but it’s not difficult to see why they become entwined. They share, in their different ways, a profound dissatisfaction with the course their lives have taken and an anxiety around their youthful potential waning into nothingness. Roland soon takes a job