Trust

by Ajay Close

(Blackfriars, £9.99)

Ajay Close's novel seems to inhabit the world described by Marx's dictum that "society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand."

Her book examines how our dominant economic system, based on greed and the power of the few, corrupts the bonds that should unite communities, comrades and even good friends.

Where there should be honesty and openness, there is skulduggery and duplicity. Where there should be clear class consciousness and loyalty, there is betrayal and ambition.

We first meet Lexa, Rae and Gabriel in 1984 as they struggle together in Goodison Farebrother, an openly sexist northern merchant bank headed by the odious and otiose Piers Kinsella.

It is also the year of the miners' strike and Lexa, a working-class Scottish woman with socialist principles undiminished by defeat and age, knows whose side she is on.

Fast forward to 2006 and the first signs of the global financial crisis bring a particular toll on Lexa and her friendships as investments that once seemed solid melt into thin air.

The people she knows and loves have also changed, their compromises accumulated over the years like burdens on their backs which threaten to break them forever.

Even the union official trying to secure long-term jobs in a private colliery that Lexa befriends during the strike ultimately seems beaten and flawed.

Close cleverly constructs this book through different lenses, opening with the microscopic corruptions and exploitations of Goodison Farebrother and then widening her view telescopically two decades later to show the same dynamics underwriting the machinations of monopoly finance capitalism and its effects on her characters' livelihoods and humanity.

The writer's style is dynamic, detailed and unsqueamish. But underlying the whole work is a rising anger - like a slowly clenching and rising fist - at the damage done to mining communities, vulnerable women and any sense in which wrongs can any longer be righted through the capitalist system.

Yet the author leavens the mounting pace and energy of the book with some acute observations and a dry humour as when, on entering the miners' social club, Lexa observes that "she had never been in a room with so many moustaches."

Sitting by the bedside of Gabriel, felled by a stroke and making a spasmodic recovery, she compares her relapses of memory to "when sanity's coat blew open to show a snazzy lining of delusion."

As she is throttled by the tentacles of compromise, she voices her self-realisation of being "more alive in her oppression than she would be after taking control."

Such moments of insight make Trust an impressive and major contribution to the growing corpus of modern British fiction that describes, analyses and excoriates capitalism and its debilitating impact on our society. Highly recommended.

Paul Simon