review by Corinna Christopher live on show May 2012
Alex Hoffman is very rich and living in a fabulous mansion in Geneva. He has created Hoffman Invest5ment Technologies, a Hedge Fund Company with a brilliant track record.
His partner and associate is Hugo Quarry, and wife Gabrielle is a conceptual artist. Her art works are made out of body scans in glass. They have no children.
One night an intruder enters Alex’s home by-passing the security system and is seen by Alex in the kitchen. When encountering him he is hit on the head and subsequently the intruder flees. After a brain scan a possible problem is shown up for Alex.
Alex creates VIXAL which is the name of a programme collecting and analysing data, a series of algorithms capable of predicting how the stockmarkets will react to events around the world. “Fear is historically the strongest emotion in economics”. It notes the frequency rate of fear-related words. e.g. terror, alarm, panic, horror, dismay, dread scare, anthrax, nuclear etc.
The story relates how Alex manages and manipulates the whole company, becoming psychotic and disturbed as the plot unfolds. It was difficult to understand and for me the book went too far towards sci-fi for a layman reader. At the end I was quite confused.
I found it irritating and although it started well the action seems to spiral out of control. It should have been a topical thriller based around the current economic depression . A disappointing book from Robert Harris who usually delivers more believable tales. His other very good historical books include “Fatherland”, “Enigma” and “Imperium”
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