A banker, we are told in an epigraph from Mark Twain, “is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.” This book being set during the financial crash of 2007-2008, the rain will be torrential and prolonged. The modern banking system, with its casino capitalism and near incomprehensible derivatives - mortgage-backed securites and collaterised debt obligations being parcelled and reparcelled, ultimately underwritten by sub-prime mortgages that were very iffy indeed, yet given the highest ratings by the ratings agencies – crashed, nearly bringing down entire economies with it.

We are in John Lanchester country here. One of The Umbrella Men’s main characters, Peter Mount, along with his high-spending wife Ivy, bring to mind the Yount couple, Roger and Arabella, in Lanchester’s Capital. Indeed the similarity in surname may or may not be coincidental.

There’s a large cast of characters in this novel, including the Mounts’ London friends, bankers, environmental activists and mining company employees, which Keith Carter takes some time assembling. There’s a dramatis personae at the start of the novel which helps to some extent, though the book might have benefitted from a casting cull. A subplot in which Peter’s marriage nearly collapses as a result of an affair he nearly has could have been omitted without compromising the message of the book, which is that, in case we had not realised, unfettered capitalism has the potential to have profound and monstrously unfair consequences.

Unlike Roger Yount, Peter Mount is not a banker but the CEO of Rareterre, a small mining company whose main asset is a rare earths mine at Mount Hood, Oregon. Rare earths, it seems, are essential to the gadgets we now take for granted: hard drives, mobile phones and personal music devices. In a neat irony, the technology behind green initiatives such as wind farms, solar panels and low-emissions hybrid cars also depends on rare earths that need to be mined, a stubbornly old school and environmentally invasive process.

Meanwhile, Amy has escaped a career in investment banking in New York and relocated herself to Mount Hood, where she is aghast to have her bucolic idyll jeopardised by the trucks rumbling past her house each day to Rareterre’s mine. She determines to do something about it and, in conjuction with Hoxie, a local activist, and using her connections with her former colleague at the investment bank, undertakes an act of sabotage in which she and Hoxie deliberately poison certain of the drill holes so that the site will fail to meet environmental standards and have its mining permits revoked. This is very bad news for Rareterre, newly in hock to the Royal Bank of Scotland to the tune of $70m.

The Umbrella Men carries the usual disclaimer of resemblance to actual persons or events being purely coincidental. Companies are notable by their absence in this disavowal. And while many of the corporations involved in exploiting Rareterre’s woes – Bloom & Beck, NOMAD Securities – are presumably made up, others thinly disguised (“Scottish Spinsters”), RBS is portrayed in all its grisly horror. And Carter lets the bank have it with both barrels. As soon as Rareterre starts to hit the buffers, a fiduciary hell that is Kafkaesque in its contortions is let loose. Merely suggesting that the company might want to bring forward a scheduled loan drawdown is interpreted as “a negotiation with creditors” and triggers a potential act of default. The amiable “relationship banker” with whom they have been dealing melts away, replaced by an unpleasant bunch from the “Corporate Restructuring Unit.” And so it goes on.

There are also echoes of the film The Big Short. That movie, a portrayal of the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, features amusing cutaways in which the likes of Margot Robbie and Anthony Bourdain take time out from their day to explain arcane banking points. The Umbrella Men, more prosaically, features a useful glossary, although its characters still occasionally need to explain things to each other that they presumably would have known as part of their day jobs.

It’s hard to keep such a large number of characters going in a novel and there are gaps – for example we are away from Oregon for a long time while bankers and lawyers and the directors of the hapless Rareterre bicker away. It’s also not entirely clear what Rareterre, with its stalled asset at Mount Hood, needs the $70m for.

The closing sequence of The Big Short begins detailing the retinue of corrupt bankers who, following the market collapse, are imprisoned for fraud. “Just kidding!” Ryan Gosling’s narrator interjects cheerfully. From Wall Street only Kareem Serageldin, a Credit Suisse banker who concealed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of losses in the bank’s mortgage-backed securities department went to jail, possibly selected at random. Keith Carter, with his explicit novel about RBS’s explicit role in the whole farrago, has to content himself with the head of the Corporate Restructuring Unit having his leg broken in a London wine bar by a disgruntled ex employee of Rareterre. That, presumably, is fictional.

Fairly interesting and mindless read. I didn't feel completely drawn to this one, and I found myself putting it down a few times without getting through it. The writing, itself was well-done, but I think it might have just not been the story for me.

This book was not what I was expecting for some reason, but it was refreshingly good. The author has a unique style which I enjoyed, along with the globe trotting. Also an interesting take on corporate culture and society. I always look for well written characters and dialog, and this fit the bill. Mr Carter is a talented writer and I look forward to more. Recommended.

Thanks very much for the ARC for review!

I do not know what drew me to this book in the first place, but I am really glad something did. If one reads as many books as I do in the time that I have, a pattern emerges. This relates to the type of books and stories that become some sort of standard. This book shook that standard at its root.

The narrative in this tale reads like a non-fiction report of situations in multiple places around the globe with tenuous but ultimately important connections to each other. More than the core story which revolves around rare-earth mineral mines, or excessive lending to people the fascinating part were the conversations. There were a lot of humours statements hidden beneath seemingly simple narration.

'Not just pleased with himself in general, which he generally was, but pleased with himself in particular'

The above was one statement that I found funny and managed to highlight, there were obviously more. The people introduced to us are extremely selfish(as well as corrupt in some form) in varying degrees but it was not hard to read about them because of something positive in the telling of the tale, which in itself is a rarity because most books that are kind of aggressive with regards to money and related motives tend to put me off. Reading about lives with focus on their financial dealings and dependencies is not something that I ever thought I would be comfortable doing because of my limited attention span for such topics but I not only read this one but enjoyed the experience! I just wish the book could have been smaller, maybe split into two parts for my own personal satisfaction. 

I highly recommend this to anyone looking for a diverting read with interesting writing.

After reading a lot of claustrophobic, navel-gazing books, it is refreshing to pick up The Umbrella Men -- Rich, immersive novel of the type that really isn't seen much these days. Helpful that there is a cast of characters and their locations at the front, a glossary, at the back. With so much detail (at times, maybe too much for the casual reader), this is a mature novel that truly hops the globe. Keith Carter, with his background in investment banking, presents his debut novel using rare earth minerals and their mining as the mcguffin. (At the risk of sounding like a movie trailer:) From the Boardrooms of London to the Gilded skyscrapers of New York, settling finally at the pristine foot of Mt. Hood in Oregon !!!! But what makes this book so readable and likeable are the well formed characters whose lives are disrupted personally and professionally by machinations of those in power.