Three newbies this month. Three! Admittedly, David had sneaked a preview in our summer social last month, however, it was lovely to see him again along with Kamya and Natalia. As Natalia has only been in Lausanne a month (quick work on finding the best social group in town – well done!) we did a little round up of fun things to do.
Here are some other lists we’ve come up with in the past
So there you go. Lots of things to get on with before next book club. I shall be checking up on you.
This month, we read London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe. The group was split on this book. Scores ranged from 3 to 9. But that’s what we like right, a bit of discord and chaos? Anyway, the average score was 5.9. That puts it on a par with Dear Mrs Bird by A J Pearce and The Burning Girls by EJ Tudor. As to be expected given the disparity in scores, the “word or phrase to sum up the book” also varied. From “a perfect cure for insomnia” to “a valiant effort”. “should have stayed an article” to “justice – a tribute to the parents”.
(for those who’d like to read the original article, you can find it here. If you don’t have a New Yorker subscription you can find it here.)
(I also found an interesting follow-up in The Times looking at where Akbar Shamji has been since)
As a total aside – since Radden Keefe’s article and book, there seems to be many more questions being asked about the whole affair. Which can only be a good thing.
Anyway…
We had to start our discussion with the key question – what happened? Was it an accident? Was it suicide? Was it murder? The group unanimously agreed that while Zac jumped on his own volition, he didn’t want to die. He likely misjudged the distance from balcony to Thames.
We asked ourselves whether there could be any blame apportioned. On Zac? On his parents? It was clear that Zac was a bit of a Walter Mitty-esque character (interestingly, the first Walter Mitty also appeared in the New Yorker). It was noted that Zac’s behaviour wasn’t unusual for London at the time. Also, see people like Anna Sorokin and Simon Leviev (plus pretty much any London-based “influencer”). Zac wasn’t the only one – and pretending to be something you’re not isn’t that unusual. Did it spiral further than it should have? Yes. Did he deserve / can you put blame on him for the way it ended? No.
Everyone agreed that there were A LOT of stories going on at the same time.
We wondered whether it was just to fill the pages or whether the author felt all the back story added to the flow of the book. One of the group suggested the because PRK had been so incredibly thorough in his research, it seemed a shame to just let all that work go to waste. My (internal) response to that is “Just because you know a lot, it doesn’t mean your audience wants to know everything” – but that’s just me.
A few were frustrated that there was no real conclusion to the book. Perhaps we’re all too used to the tie-it-up-neatly-with-a-bow true crime podcasts and documentaries. Does it matter that we don’t have a clear-cut answer? Isn’t that the point of the book? That sometimes we don’t know, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell the story?
We chatted about whether we actually liked Zac. I mean, he was 19, so given the age range of most of the book club, it’s not likely that we would have hung out much. Did we feel sorry for him? We questioned why he felt he had to be like this. We discussed the role of family and whether he inherited traits from his grandfather (interestingly – but unsurprisingly – some of the points brought up in the book do not make it to his Wikipedia page).
We touched on the other key characters – Akbar and Verinder. We tried to understand the mechanics of the various cons going on. Where did the money come from? Why did people think they were going to paid, what, and when? Why did Akbar want to “share” his mark (Zac) with Verinder? Was there a whole sex thing going on?
Finally, we talked about police ineptitude. It really seems like they didn’t care what happened (which is weird considering Zac’s middle-class upbringing… generally the police seem to like that). Or, was it a question that they knew something fishy was going on but they couldn’t prove it and therefore conviction seemed unlikely. OR (and this is where I put on my tin foil hat) was it because there was actually a bigger investigation going on and delving into the Zac death would have derailed everything?
We finished our conversation by deciding that if a film were to be made of the whole scandal, an investigation into the seedy underworld of London would be the most interesting angle.
And that’s it. Well, it’s not, but there are some discussions I don’t write down.
Lausanne Book Club 