“Sap, n. Hiberno-English slang. A gauche person; one ungifted with social nous. Also a dupe or mark. The butt of the joke. That one person at the party who just doesn’t get it and never will.”

A post Celtic Tiger story where the generation of unscrupulous profiteers that wreaked havoc on the Irish economy is still around and well. When fathers are sharks, members of a privileged, self-assured clique that has taken full advantage of the economic boom and various loopholes to cunningly divert money for personal enrichment, what are their children going to be like?
We are in South Dublin, an area partly associated with privilege and status. In a recent conversation with fellow Irish writer Niamh Campbell, Kevin Power has explained that he knows this world very well and has remarked that in Ireland class, privilege and social divisions are stark realities and that some structures and places still hold and have a meaning for many.
By reading this riveting novel, one actually gets the impression of cliquey places where privilege replicates itself, where you can make the right connections, of schools where pupils – future leaders -- forge long-lasting friendships and future alliances. This is the picture emerging in White City and the milieu that Kevin Power continues to scrutinize after his successful debut Bad Day in Blackrock. While his first novel was about murder case involving students connected with fictional Brookfield College (albeit loosely inspired by true events), in White City the Lads, former members of the rugby team, have grown up and have started moving their first steps in the world: a world “networked, brainless, awed by money, superdense with artificial pleasures, rigged from above in their favour.”

We first meet 27-year-old Ben in a rehab where he is processing all that brought him there, which he does by writing an angry, self-deprecating confession (Dostroyevsky-style: it is not a coincidence that we find him reading Notes from the Underground at the beginning), with his psychiatrist nagging him and struggling to make him accept responsibility for his actions. We learn that his father is a wealthy investment banker investigated for a major fraud and the family estate has been confiscated. Ejected from a world of privilege and left to his own devices, with an alcoholic mother and fraudulent father as a role model, he drops out of his Ph.D. and gets a) into drugs, b) into a relationship he navigates as if in a fog and c) into a sketchy investment scheme put together by the Lads and their wealthy fathers, a big deal he prefers to honest, low-paying jobs with a view to get his finances sorted. This deal takes them to the Balkans, where ruthless individuals are speculating on the ruins of ex-Yugoslavia. Ben is an interesting character: clueless, arrogant, selfish, a mirror image of those who surround him and a puppet in their hands. He is struggling to take charge of his life, let alone take a moral stance. Ben’s voice is truly engaging, particularly the use the author makes of the distance between the Ben who is writing his memoir, his resistance and his riveting commentary, and the Ben at the time of the facts: Kevin Power’s controlled use of language, humour and irony is excellent, and this allows him to deliver a witty social satire that is biting, ferociously funny and spot-on.

White City is an indictment of Celtic Tiger Ireland’s corrupt establishment and an unflinching portrait of a weak, hyper-protected generation that is utterly unprepared for the responsibilities of life because it has always had it all. And if you think you know where the story is heading (at the beginning I thought this would be more predictable), Kevin Power will baffle your expectations in unique ways. At 450+ pages the novel feels a bit lengthy at times, but still a very engaging, enjoyable read.

I am grateful to the publisher for an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. (