I was on the road a lot, for a few years, selling books like a salesman sells brushes (except these, of course, are magic brushes), and one of the great pleasures of being a writer on the move is that you can talk to anyone. People tell you things.
Sometimes, at a foreign book festival, it would be my job to talk to the money, which is how I found myself, in the years after the crash, sitting beside one or other jet-lagged Master of the Financial Universe and keeping the conversation going, which is to say talking about him.
These men have their problems too. One guy is living in Hong Kong, the tax rate is 16 per cent but he can’t let his children outdoors because of the smog. Another is based in Singapore, where real-estate prices are through the roof. He has an enthusiastic number of children who have to be educated in three or four countries, with all the attendant expenses, whether Oxbridge, or Ivy League, or some liberal-arts place in Pennsylvania that no no one has ever heard of.
It is clear this man feels guilty about the amount of money he earns, and trapped by the amount of money he needs to earn. He lives in an international space. He wakes up in the middle of the night and does not know which hotel he is in or whether the bathroom is to the left or the right. So I say, “Why don’t you go home?”
“Home?” he says. Home is New Zealand. It is a beautiful place. The schools, he agrees, are mostly free and mostly fine. But no, he cannot go home. His brother is there – an architect. An out-of-work architect. There is nothing for him to do in New Zealand. He cannot go home.
I might have pointed out that it was men like him who put men like his brother out of work, but I am struck by his melancholy, the way he lifts his eyes and sees New Zealand, somewhere on the white tablecloth between the floral display and the bottle of red wine. He looks like Odysseus remembering Ithaca, or Dorothy Kansas: he is pining for a place he is too rich to live in any more.
Of course Penelope is faithfully waiting for Odysseus to return, and Auntie Em could never stop worrying about Dorothy. Home is the place where a woman loves you from. But although it is my all-time favourite thing to do to a man, I do not ask this very rich, slightly disoriented man about his mother. He has problems enough as it is.
You see them at the front of the plane, a global community of money men, tethered to the planet at one or other tax point, effectively stateless. As the money washes over and the money washes back, they move with it, and all of them are going to retire some day to a place they can call their own. As opposed to one of the many places they just own.
At least that is what they say they want to do, but I have my doubts: I don’t think they are ever going to make it back to Kansas.
At another one of these festivals, in Germany, I meet a young woman called Alice, who is studying transnational fiction. This is a very trendy academic area – a friend in the United States says that Irish studies are in decline there, it’s all transnational studies now: migrants, emigrants; it is all about the intercultural experience; exile, alienation, flow.
Alice says this is all very well, but it suits people to say that we are free to move around now. Information moves across borders and money moves across borders and we think that people move too, but if you are, say, a Somali refugee in Dadaab refugee camp (population nearly 400,000) then a border is a very real thing and being “stateless” is very far from being trendy or unfettered.
Sometimes, at a foreign book festival, it would be my job to talk to the money, which is how I found myself, in the years after the crash, sitting beside one or other jet-lagged Master of the Financial Universe and keeping the conversation going, which is to say talking about him.
These men have their problems too. One guy is living in Hong Kong, the tax rate is 16 per cent but he can’t let his children outdoors because of the smog. Another is based in Singapore, where real-estate prices are through the roof. He has an enthusiastic number of children who have to be educated in three or four countries, with all the attendant expenses, whether Oxbridge, or Ivy League, or some liberal-arts place in Pennsylvania that no no one has ever heard of.
It is clear this man feels guilty about the amount of money he earns, and trapped by the amount of money he needs to earn. He lives in an international space. He wakes up in the middle of the night and does not know which hotel he is in or whether the bathroom is to the left or the right. So I say, “Why don’t you go home?”
“Home?” he says. Home is New Zealand. It is a beautiful place. The schools, he agrees, are mostly free and mostly fine. But no, he cannot go home. His brother is there – an architect. An out-of-work architect. There is nothing for him to do in New Zealand. He cannot go home.
I might have pointed out that it was men like him who put men like his brother out of work, but I am struck by his melancholy, the way he lifts his eyes and sees New Zealand, somewhere on the white tablecloth between the floral display and the bottle of red wine. He looks like Odysseus remembering Ithaca, or Dorothy Kansas: he is pining for a place he is too rich to live in any more.
Of course Penelope is faithfully waiting for Odysseus to return, and Auntie Em could never stop worrying about Dorothy. Home is the place where a woman loves you from. But although it is my all-time favourite thing to do to a man, I do not ask this very rich, slightly disoriented man about his mother. He has problems enough as it is.
You see them at the front of the plane, a global community of money men, tethered to the planet at one or other tax point, effectively stateless. As the money washes over and the money washes back, they move with it, and all of them are going to retire some day to a place they can call their own. As opposed to one of the many places they just own.
At least that is what they say they want to do, but I have my doubts: I don’t think they are ever going to make it back to Kansas.
At another one of these festivals, in Germany, I meet a young woman called Alice, who is studying transnational fiction. This is a very trendy academic area – a friend in the United States says that Irish studies are in decline there, it’s all transnational studies now: migrants, emigrants; it is all about the intercultural experience; exile, alienation, flow.
Alice says this is all very well, but it suits people to say that we are free to move around now. Information moves across borders and money moves across borders and we think that people move too, but if you are, say, a Somali refugee in Dadaab refugee camp (population nearly 400,000) then a border is a very real thing and being “stateless” is very far from being trendy or unfettered.
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