DRAYTON AND MACKENZIE, by Alexander Starritt
If work occupies so many hours of our lives, why are characters in today’s novels so often oddly untethered from it? Reviewers semi-frequently make explicit pleas for more fiction about labor. Novels that do address the subject — to name a few, Joshua Ferris’s “Then We Came to the End,” Hilary Leichter’s “Temporary,” Adelle Waldman’s “Help Wanted” — tend to focus on office-drone work, tenuous work, grueling work.
Arguably even more absent from fiction, though, are the efforts of the modern 1 percent, the capital-fueled entrepreneurs undeniably shaping — increasingly, it seems, disfiguring — the world around us. Surely a desire for fiction to reflect its times would also entail wanting more about this subject.
The Scottish-German writer Alexander Starritt’s third novel, “Drayton and Mackenzie,” is about two young men, James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie, who study at Oxford in the early 21st century (where they don’t know each other), go on to jobs as consultants at McKinsey (where they kind of tolerate each other), and then start a hugely ambitious company meant to harness clean energy from the predictable and powerful tides off the coast of Aberdeen, Scotland. The novel was the rare fictional entry on the longlist for The Financial Times’s Business Book of the Year Award.
As that laurel might suggest, Starritt’s book treats business with seriousness and respect. This is not a satire for an age that is side-eyeing capitalism. James and Roland are complex characters and never villainous, though James might test your patience, especially early on. He excels at Oxford — the kind of student who “makes the others seem worth it,” one professor tells another. His success is fueled by intellectual dexterity and a “sheer capacity for work”; at one point, Roland thinks that James’s “ability to withstand boredom was like a superpower.” His Achilles’ heel is a pronounced lack of social ability, which nearly gets him fired before his career at the consulting giant has really begun. James is the value-neutral hyper-logical type who daydreams about how McKinsey might theoretically help Al Qaeda make its terrorism more politically efficient. He can come off like a jerk, but he isn’t quite one.
Starritt is kind to James but does gently mock him on occasion. Women he meets on Tinder “didn’t seem to grasp that running a tidal energy company was incredibly cool.” And “he was surprised by how badly the girls he sat opposite in bars and restaurants reacted to McKinsey.” But ultimately, James is exasperating at times and sympathetic at others — less an aspiring Übermensch than a person whose brain is an awkward fit for the world.
Roland isn’t quite Oscar to James’s Felix, but they do make an odd couple. Roland is Scottish and was raised in Cairo, where his father worked in the oil industry. He’s a searcher who retains a strong wanderlust. He flubs his finals at Oxford and spends a few years traveling, including significant time teaching in a remote area of India.
From that experience, Roland determines that teaching isn’t “scalable.” James sees the wisdom in this: “You could carry one kid up the hill to better prospects, but then you just had to trudge back down for another.” The two decide to have McKinsey focus on education in one region of India to see what broader change they might create. (“As for so many previous Englishmen,” Starritt dryly notes, “it seemed so simple to alter the destiny of India.”) But the aftereffects of the 2008 financial crisis scuttle the plan. That financial crash, Brexit and Covid are three of the momentous events that form the book’s backdrop.
Starritt’s narrative talents shine most impressively in a long, pivotal section when James and Roland are sent to Aberdeen, in early 2009, to fire “hundreds of people” at an oil company called Subsea7. Here we get a granular look at McKinsey’s work and see the psychological complexities of workplace cataclysms; for one thing, employees prefer James’s blunt approach to Roland’s friendlier attempts to get to know them as he cans them. And while conducting this grim task, the pair meet Alan, an engineer at Subsea7, who inspires James’s idea for a tidal energy company and reluctantly agrees to join the fledgling project.
Much of what follows is devoted to the technological and financial concerns of an improbable start-up. Eventually, James decides it would be best for the company to pivot so that its tidal machines produce hydrogen for use in rocket ships. (This reviewer, very much a humanities major, can say that all the engineering talk throughout the novel at least feels convincing.) The book’s second half can be slightly bloated — by Roland’s repeated threats to leave the company or details about various funding rounds — but the plot remains mostly aerodynamic and the relationship between James and Roland is richly developed.
Along the way, Starritt effectively plants brief portraits of real-life figures like Ben Bernanke, then the chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, and Mario Draghi, at the time the president of the European Central Bank. (“He could bankrupt the state of Italy with two sentences.”)
Perhaps most daringly, Starritt also includes appearances by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. James meets both men and secures funding from Thiel. Starritt wisely doesn’t inhabit the experiences of either billionaire the way he does with Bernanke and Draghi. At one point, we learn that James “didn’t register Thiel’s budding notoriety. He wasn’t interested in it.” It makes sense that James isn’t interested in it, and that he appreciates the ambition and results of Thiel’s efforts. And there’s more than one moment when Starritt signals the complexity of these men’s legacies. But an author bold enough to address the world we currently live in, and to name names, risks our being distracted by glimpsed corners of that world. There were times when I craved a bit more about what these funders and dreamers might drag the rest of us through on their way to the heavens.
To anyone who, in 2026, might not be in the mood for an epic story about two tech bros: I get it. But Starritt’s book is not just for business readers who might feel too often ignored in the pages of literary fiction; it has all the pleasures of a traditional, decades-spanning tale about individuals both caught up in and influencing history. One might ponder, while reading it, some fruitful questions about the very nature of socially attuned novels, but only while Starritt does his job and then some.
DRAYTON AND MACKENZIE | By Alexander Starritt | Atlantic Monthly Press | 502 pp. | $30
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