08 Jun 2013 04:16:48
The Levant Company was formed by Elizabeth I in 1581, a full 19 years before the East India Company. By the final years of Queen Bess's reign (when The Trade Secret opens) the company controlled all of England's increasingly lucrative trade with Turkey and the Levant, running profitable lines in textiles, arms, munitions, currants and, according to some (Newman among them), Christian slaves. By the time James I came to power, the company was dictating foreign policy, keeping him out of wars with the Turks.
Newman suggests that three further precursors of modern capitalism also emerged during this period. England began to become aware of the pleasures of coffee, of the usefulness of oil, and of the advantages to rapid communication offered by homing pigeons. And he would have us believe that these three are introduced to London largely thanks to his fictional creation, Nat Bramble.
Bramble starts off as the indentured servant to Sir Anthony Shirley, a genuine historical figure, who once headed an unofficial British embassy in Isfahan, capital of Persia – and then talked his way into also becoming an ambassador for the Persians in Italy. As Newman renders him, he's a man who loves to shout salty period phrases like "cock a bones" and to beat the crap out of poor old Nat, who takes the first opportunity he can to escape, and we follow him as he forms an endearing friendship with an eccentric Persian poet and oil-trader called Darius, moves in and out of captivity, and travels, as he likes to put it, "halfway round the world".
Slotting a thesis about modern capitalism into the picaresque 17th-century adventures of a servant "named after the bush he'd been whelped under" doesn't bespeak subtlety. Newman would also be hard pressed to defend himself against charges of tub-thumping. When Nat rides a ship called the Mayflower he observes it contains in its hold "all the ingredients for a nation". In the Mayflower, he also discovers the trade secret of the book's title, namely that "the poverty of the poor made the riches of the rich".
Such Dave Spart moments are annoying – but fortunately, only moments. More often, the absence of delicacy might even be described as a strength. Back in the 1990s, in his first incarnation as a comedian, Newman often played the part of FJ Lewis, a history professor prone to comparing his comedy partner David Baddiel to such things as a "piece of old crust, with, like, blue mould all over it". He displays a similar delight in silliness and uck throughout The Trade Secret. Nat's world is full of mud, gore and dead animals in various stages of putrefaction. His escapades are daft, frequently bone-crunching and generally undignified. They also depend on chance and coincidence to a degree that would make Dickens blush – except that Newman shows no shame. He even enjoys underlining such moments: "A day later and I would have missed him," remarks Sir Anthony after a typically silly encounter. You can almost see him winking at the camera.
Sir Anthony is also involved in the book's most outrageous scene, a wrestling match between himself and the ambassador Hoseyn Ali Beg on the steps of the Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome. "There was some work inside – a bite, a knee to the groin", we are told, and it all seems joyfully preposterous. Except, of course, the fight really did happen. It turns out that plenty more of the book's excesses are based on real events. In fact, Newman's weaving of fact and fiction is really quite deft. Even those coincidences start to contribute to a cleverly nuanced point about how much of the system we assume to be inscribed in stone is actually dependent on chance and individual fortune. It might seem absurd to suggest that modern capitalism could depend on someone like Nat Bramble, but Newman will have you believing it's the system's fault rather than his. It turns out to be quite a subtle book after all – albeit one whose lead character is forced to kiss a dead goat.
