REVIEWS

Virtual world in ecstasy - Prof. Dr. Klaus Kocks

When an insider gets into storytelling, you should listen. Markus A. Will's novels know what they're talking about; the author chats out of school. Unusually enough, however, he tends to give away the punchlines first, then launches into his narrative. He can afford to do this because he doesn't intend to spin simple jokes but has substantial material to contend with. Will depicts a world that is far from us and yet close. This is especially true for his new book about a very dark banker.

Markus A. Will has written a outlandish crime novel about a crazy, savvy elite of young money traders who take greed and power to extremes with sophisticated, yet covered methods. Their vocabulary revolves around derivatives, bitcoins, and data clouds. These super tricksters find money laundering on the Darknet super exciting. As the author states: "A life between fuck frequencies, bonus heights and market margins, faked Libor interest rates, false vows of love and whole life lies." Eros and power, an old theme charged with striking thoughts - and how! This is not the core of the novel, but as life goes, the edges of a seemingly demure bourgeoisie quickly fray. The author gleefully frays his characters.

The grotesque is a sophisticated stylistic form because it confronts change with alienation, precisely not a satire that provokes thought with a funny idea. The grotesque aims at deeper-seated border crossings. The author works on this with virtuoso linguistic images. He is a master of the saucy, the subtle humor with a coarse background and capricious ideas. But the trigger is: Markus A. Will could only write this novel because he sees through the financial scene and knows its mechanisms precisely. The details described about money transactions and dialogues about financial engineering lead into the depths of a world that make the outsider fearful and anxious.

This is precisely where the sophistication of the grotesque works. It catches us up again and again. We have known the reality of daredevil financial jugglers not only since the dramatic Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. Who does still remember the derivatives trader Nicholas Leeson, who 26 years ago drove Barings Bank, the oldest investment bank in Great Britain, to ruin with high-handed speculation! To this day, the golden boys fancy themselves in the throes of their senses. Failure is not in the cards. Like a monstrance, they are now carrying before them the audacious opportunities of a digital smart currency without regulatory authorities. The battle cry for the maximum drowns out any insight that the wheel could turn over faster and faster. The point is not to create benefits for customers, but to live up to their own promise of salvation with lavish profits in their own accounts. A compendium of immorality.

The author contrasts this development with an old-school banker who still believes in real cash and in a central bank that ensures order and transparency on the financial markets - namely the retired Swiss banker Dr. Carl Emile Etienne Bensien, dignified, serious and wealthy, and - because this novel is also about a lot of love – ends up in other women's beds. Where to put his guilty conscience when love calls! He is married to the publisher and editor Carla Bell, another case of marital infidelity. Her online news service, the "CityView" in London, is on the trail of a shrewd dirty trick.

Her life is pure stress, especially since her editorial manager, Diana Lundgren, is out of office. She cut her wrists in the bathtub. "But only so much, or so little, that she basically had to be found by the housekeeper. That almost went wrong, though, because the fairy godmother got stuck on the subway that morning, of all mornings, and arrived half an hour later than normal." Devotedly, the author relates such episodes. As for Dr. Bensien, he dies in an avalanche while skiing. The book would have benefited from keeping him alive. A character who stands above things (except for a moment for his escapades). As long as he is alive in the novel, he provides a soothing balance to oppose the spirit of the times, while there is the great tremor of complex relationships and greedy financial maneuvering.

The author translates the evil of an unabashedly savage financial guard into the fantasy, into science fiction. An unbelievable world that we dare not think about, even though we experience concretely every day the madness of an accelerating world through artificial intelligence and the Internet. Behind it there is no longer a revolution because technical progress is so fast that a new insight is already outdated the moment it becomes true. We can no longer keep up with our thinking. The financial acrobats have long since outgrown this sense of wonder. They have quickly guessed what can be done with this new world.

The protagonist of Dark Banker is Frederik "Fred" Mullen, a banned ex-investment banker in London. Because he can't keep his hands-off dirty business, but doesn't want to get dirty himself, he creates and builds The Dark Banker - a human robot named Iris Hubot. She thinks logically, looks like an Instagram beauty or a model from Vogue. Other people think she's human, although she shows unusual agility when turning her head, and one woman tells her after a fall: "You fell like you were made of rubber." For Fred, moreover, she is a pleasing and exceedingly capable "high-performance fucking machine." Nothing human is alien to her, and thus the author perfects the illusion of a world that man is in competition with a robot. He puts the virtual world in ecstasy.

Fred founds the camouflage company abc.tec for his Dark Banker. Iris becomes smarter and smarter, more and more confident. She masters all the financial tricks, manages the company, presents and conducts negotiations. And she gets to know Fred better and better: as "a dirty fucking asshole". Her job is precisely to wash dirty, black mafia money from the deepness of the Darknet. Iris cleans the dirty digital money with a "digital laundromat" where all evil traces are thoroughly covered. Iris, however, wants to wash herself clean and have nothing to do with the forbidden dirty deals. Even more, she wants to put Fred in jail. But it doesn't come to that, because he is murdered by the butler in the stately villa of Don Carlo Martini at the picturesque Lago di Como. This Don, godfather of Milan, Catholic and cunning, entrusts the “cleaning lady” Iris with his dirty money. The author goes into the depths of the social facade, exposing it to show what remains of a man when he has forfeited everything, the appearance of being venerable and exalted: death. He kills himself in his 71st year and his muse immediately with him.

Anyway, there is a lot of murder in this novel, and again with bizarre abandon. For example, regulatory banking expert Dr. Ellen Klausen pokes her CIA agent leader in the heart and palate with her sharply filed five inch very high heels. For this, the CIA presumably returned the favour with an equally abstruse method. The lady hung stabbed to death nailed to a cross on Christmas Eve in the small cemetery behind the old church in dreamlike snowy Zermatt. One must first come up with this Easter ambience in the peaceful Christmas season. One wonders, of course, why the author also includes this banker in the novel: Because he wants to show the crash of the dignified banking world in contrast to the "digital nomads" using the example of Deutsche Bank - a financial institution that only 30 years ago wanted to penetrate the world's top with investment banking. But the bank lost more and more of its value, shrank, became smaller, was torn between ever new strategies and even - as we know today: only temporarily - was overtaken by market capitalization by a "dwarf," the former "porn page payment processor" Wirecard. The sideways glance at such developments does not detract from the main thrust of the narrative. Rather, it deepens it, because the actions of a cunning elite on the digital Darknet make the banks look like they are from a bygone world.

The author dovetails the fiction of his novel with contemporary true events. In this way, the reader is once again immersed in the Greek crisis, the Italian crisis, Brexit, the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, the crash of bitcoin in 2018, and the withdrawal of Angela Merkel as the German conservative party chairwoman. In this way, he repeatedly enables docking opportunities to what was and is quickly forgotten, even though these were fundamental developments. In order to absorb these interlockings narratively, the author places, for example, his novel character Dr. Konstantin Diospolos next to the Greek finance minister, the "flamboyant" and real Yanis Varoufakis. Later the Greek works for the European Central Bank in Frankfurt. One suspects what is coming. He visits a Greek restaurant and the owner, in unbridled rage over the Euro policy against his country, rams a sharp butcher knife into his chest. He survives, however, and readers may continue to enjoy his role as the "Prussian Greek."

In the epilogue, Markus A. Will writes that a German editor did not want to publish his book "because the genre classification is a bit out of the ordinary. She probably feared that the book could not be clearly positioned as a crime novel.” But what does that mean? Let's take a closer look: As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, professors of German literature were still telling their students that a crime novel was not a novel. Then literary studies stiffened to the thesis that the crime novel was a novel, but not an art. Today, every good crime novel is also a social novel that depicts and describes people's fears, hopes, happiness and longings. What we consider unreal, the author deepens into the surrealistic. Therein lies the mystery that the reader interprets in his spectrum of experience. The author virtually asks to translate reality again and again. This is exactly why he has written a memorable social novel as a crime story.