Patrick Radden Keefe investigates Russian money in London through a teenager’s suspicious death |
New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe has become one of a small number of narrative non-fiction writers whose latest book is keenly anticipated. He has become such a byword for a certain kind of investigative reporting, he even cameoed as himself in the final scene of HBO hit series, Industry, this year. His fifth book, London Falling, has been eagerly awaited, largely thanks to the impact of his last two books, which minted his sterling reputation.
His 2018 book on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Say Nothing, won the Orwell Prize and was adapted for a 2024 streaming series. His 2021 book about the opioid epidemic and the culpability of the Sackler family, Empire of Pain, was also adapted for streaming (as Painkiller) in 2023. (He has also published a collection of his magazine articles, Rogues. And his first book, Chatter, was published in 2005.)
Review: London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador)
The shortest gap between Keefe’s books is three years; the longest is nine, which is some wait for his fans. Unlike those crime novelists who produce annually, he deals in actual events and people, which are not so easily wrangled.
More of that later, as it intrinsic to Keefe’s methods and his success. Last month, London Falling, was published to intense interest and early acclaim.
London Falling begins with the death of a 19-year-old man, who fell from a luxury high-rise apartment in London in the early hours of November 29 2019, and gradually radiates outward.
Zac Brettler was an edgy, funny, ambitious young man from a comfortable, middle-class family who was fascinated by, then drawn to, wealth and power. He loved The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that revelled in rampant capitalism, and admired Vladimir Putin, telling a cousin democracy was overrated. He liked to tell tales so tall, even his friends called him out as a bullshit artist.
Then he moved out of home. Unknown to his parents, he invented a false identity as the son of a Russian oligarch. Worse, he fell in with shady business people and violent criminals. His apparent suicide shocked his parents, who spent a lot of time and emotional energy struggling to come to terms with their son’s death and the lies he had been telling them.
As his mother, Rachelle, commented, it felt like “trying to piece together a jigsaw in the dark”.
Zac’s teen years coincided with the rise of social media, intensifying whatever issues he was facing, as Keefe notes.
Zac might not have been delusional in a clinical sense, but he did inhabit a world in which social media was beginning to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy. Increasingly, any sense of a shared conscious existence was starting to give way to a more individualised, algorithmically bespoke form of virtual reality, in which our most personal and idiosyncratic anxieties and aspirations are reflected back to us, and magnified, by our smartphones.
Zac might not have been delusional in a clinical sense, but he did inhabit a world in which social media was beginning to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy. Increasingly, any sense of a shared conscious existence was starting to give way to a more individualised, algorithmically bespoke form of virtual reality, in which our most personal and idiosyncratic anxieties and aspirations are reflected back to us, and magnified, by our smartphones.
Keefe follows every twist and turn in Matthew and Rachelle Brettler’s efforts to solve the mystery of their son’s death. Did he have a psychological breakdown that led him to take his own life? Was he so scared of the criminal he was associating with – Verinder Sharma, also known as Indian Dave – that he jumped to his death in the Thames? After all, he had told Sharma his fictitious Russian oligarch father was worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
A Google........