'But the English, by Christ's blood and tears, keep three shops of arms and munitions in Constantinople, and transport Christian slaves around the Ottoman Empire. Only the Levant Company, only the English do this.’
If you saw Robert Newman's Brief History of Oil stand-up you know how this story ends; but here, in The Trade Secret, Newman returns to the dawn of what he considers the driving force of modern history: oil, and England’s willingness to do whatever is needed to control it.
The story begins in the final years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, with the Levant Company, in many ways the precursor of the modern corporation, holding the monopoly to all English trade with Turkey and the Levant. In Persia, Sir Anthony Sherley is playing the role of ambassador in the court of the Shah, and his seventeen year old servant, Nat Bramble, is about to desert Shirley’s service to set off on a quest for a hidden oil field located under an ancient Mithraic temple.
The book is dominated by the sense that 'it takes a lot of work by some dedicated men to make this world unjust'. As a campaigning member of the UK’s Green Party, Newman’s interest in the subject is heavily political and largely disapproving. He is too good a novelist, though, to let the drama of the markets escape him. The book is filled with the romance of business and the tantalising possibility of fortunes to be made by whoever can first supply the market’s demands.
Never far away from the excitement, there is a melancholy feeling of the world being out of kilter; of the fun of the adventure always being marred by the evil in man’s nature, brought out by the love of money.
'The trade secret no longer seemed to be an understanding of how all these commodities might be used, of why they were bought and sold. The trade secret now seemed to be that the poverty of the poor made the riches of the rich. Scratch the trade and discover the sin. He no longer felt full of capacity and ambition. He felt like krill in the belly of a Sea-Monster, and he didn't know where he’d be thrown up.’
Goodness, innocence and honest ambition are constantly at the mercy of the schemes of evil men, particularly the historically accurate but altogether implausible Sherley brothers, whose adventures, retold in the book, make the authors point far better than fiction could. There is a treasure trove of historical anecdotes and period details. The exotic sights of the Persian bazaar are revelled in, but the characters always remain sympathetic.
As a novel, The Trade Secret is less successful than his previous book, The Fountain at the Centre of the World (set in the lead up to the Seattle World Trade protests of 1999) where the pitch black humour of the characters matched the backdrop perfectly. Here, the central plot is more cheerful, and it jars slightly with the grimness of its setting. That said, there is a lot to enjoy, especially for fans of historical fiction, and anyone who enjoyed The Fountain at the Centre of the World would enjoy this too.
In some ways, the drama of the story is let down by the facts it relates. There can be no final showdown with the baddies, and no chance for good to definitively triumph over evil. The Levant Company did very well out of the slave trade, and the people involved died wealthy and content. Progress only came much later and, Newman certainly believes, has yet to fully arrive.
