Technophobic (?) reading: "The Fear Index" by Robert Harris

This was the second of the audiobooks consumed on my solo road trip to Italy, this being made possible by the fact that a 14 hour drive became an 18 hour one thanks to a large diversion in Switzerland to avoid a two hour queue at the St. Gothard tunnel, more queues at the Italian border and the inevitable stop-and-start in the tratto appenninico  of the A1 motorway. None of which bothered me too much, as this was a gripping tale which wiled away the hours quite nicely.

This book is an unashamed thriller, in thriller mode, with leading characters referred to tersely by their surnames. I can't claim the intellectual respectability for an audiobook I invoked for Station Eleven, because this was an abridged version of the original novel (though still a meaty six hours of listening), but it is a high-grade thriller nonetheless, as you would expect from the excellent Harris. Nor is it ideas-free. Indeed, it is one of those speculative books which looks at the world and wonders what would happen if things were taken to their (or at least a) logical conclusion. (Dave Eggers' The Circle) was another in this mode.

The story centres on Dr Alexander Hoffman, a brilliant scientist, who has taken his knowledge, honed at CERN, from which he was somewhat mysteriously fired, and used it to build a fortune as a hedge fund manager. His hedge fund, Hoffman Associates, uses a sophisticated algorithm, developed by Hoffman himself and managed by a team of  PHD level "quants" (analysts) he has recruited himself and all of whom, we are told, are somewhere on the autistic scale. The fund has been extremely successful and has handsomely rewarded a motley crew of super-rich investors over years of bear markets. As the book opens, Hoffman is going live with an updated version of his algorithm, dubbed VIXAL-4, and is pitching to his investors for additional funds. 


On the same day, there is an inexplicable, murderously-intentioned break-in at Hoffman's super-secure rich man's house, and he enters an nightmarish spiral of events which turns his world upside down at the same time as VIXAL-4 proves spectacularly successful in delivering huge profits. 

Robert Harris

The two are of course not unconnected, and Harris' book steadily reveals how they are related. It is an extremely clever, well-crafted tale, and, this being a thriller, I'll say no more for fear of spoiling. Note however that fear is the operative word. I'll also say that you'll never look at financial markets quite the same way again.

It's a good, fast-paced story, fun for the summer. Maybe it doesn't quite feel up there with the Roman trilogy (where is the third, by the way?), but this is a quality thriller with at least a couple of brain cells to rub together.