It’s a mark of Starritt’s confidence that the quest to harness tidal power – the book’s main business – gets going only 200 pages in. We feel in safe hands from the start, reassured that he knows the story’s every last turn ... With a joyful knack for pithy analogy, the writing holds our attention as much as the events ... while there’s no shortage of chat about electrolysers and optimal blade rotation, Starritt keeps his focus on the human story of invention: dangling quietly over the action is the fact that James, lauded as a visionary, relies mostly for his ideas on other people. In the end, though, critique of disruptor-era genius is less important here than feeling and friendship.
This is a big, bustling novel about love, friendship, money, ambition and the 21st century, packed with humour and intelligent observations ... Starritt is particularly good at capturing the millennial generation and its gripes ... Starritt’s depiction of the credit crunch elevates the novel to something more than a corporate Sally Rooney novel for boys ... This is an eyes-glinting, teeth-bared satire — of Oxbridge, of management consultancy, of tech bros and start-ups, of the British class system — but Starritt’s heartbreaking conclusion cuts through all that sarcasm and cleverness. I finished it tear-stained, feeling a bit hollowed out.
An example of a genre that has become vanishingly rare of late: the capacious, ambitious, politically engaged Bildungsroman ... At 500 pages, Drayton and Mackenzie can feel overlong. The passages dramatizing the American subprime crisis feel superfluous and intrusive. But Alexander Starritt can write as elegantly as Alan Hollinghurst and as fluently as Jonathan Coe. It is the prose that keeps us turning the pages of this epic novel of friendship and twenty-first-century life.
Alexander Starritt has form with satire ... For his third novel, Drayton and Mackenzie, he is back at it, mercilessly mocking everything from Oxbridge and management consultants to tech bros and new parents in a story that hinges on whether two unlikely friends can make a success of their tidal energy start-up. It’s more fun that it sounds ... What with the emotion of the escalating bromance and making James someone ‘who hasn’t read a novel since university’, Starritt goes all out to hook the same sort of elusive male reader who lapped up Andrew O’Hagan’s tear-jerking Mayflies. And good luck to him. He certainly hooked me.
Drayton and Mackenzie is a curious novel, its aim not always entirely discernible: is it a satire of the contemporary startup, a grand state-of-the-nation address, a touching deep dive into male friendship? It tries to be all three, and if it doesn’t pull it off at every turn, it is nonetheless engagingly energetic and possessed of a certain endearing stubbornness – like Drayton himself, and the tides he seeks to harness.
The protagonists’ shared ambition is almost a match for the author’s. Spanning 17 years and some 500 pages, Drayton and Mackenzie is simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship. A novel has not done so much so well since Michael Chabon’s friendship epic, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay ... The real delight of Drayton and Mackenzie is the relationship of its leads. This evolves as you’d expect — beginning in incomprehension and developing into something unbreakable — yet is so beautifully done, I’ll admit my vision wasn’t the clearest by the end. (Seriously, if you thought Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies was sad . . .) I don’t know how Starritt is going to top this one.
Drayton and Mackenzie is a novel with impressive scope, beginning in 2005 and ending in 2021, with an epilogue that jumps 20 years into the future ... Each chapter is drawn with amazing realism and detail. The dialogue is true to a large cast of different characters from different worlds ... Starritt has an extraordinary ability to capture not only the texture of an individual life but also the underlying economic and political tremors that shape it across time ... Starritt’s achievement lies in making the sweep of history profoundly personal.
Novels that dip into the lives of their characters every few years risk them seeming detached from the world or clumsily inserted into historical events. Drayton and Mackenzie, Alexander Starritt’s third novel about two mismatched friends, enters into their lives at intervals, and falls into neither of those traps ... Deft and engaging ... The heart of the book is a thoughtful study of male friendship ... By the end, the reader has formed much the same attachment to them both.
It’s a treat to come across a novel whose execution matches its ambition as closely as Drayton and Mackenzie ... A meticulously worked-out novel which, against the odds, is rich in character and, latterly, extremely moving.
I haven't read Alexander Starritt's first two novels, both of which have won prizes, but Drayton and Mackenzie will surely win more ... This is a novel rich in detail, rich too in background, the parents and extended families of both men being brought convincingly to life ... It is a novel of ideas which is also richly enjoyable; a novel that demands more than a weekly reviewer can offer, for it calls for a second reading and a slow one if its riches are to be fully grasped.
Starritt draws on his experience as a journalist and entrepreneur to create a detailed, convincing portrayal of late 2000s management consulting and start-up culture that will appeal to fans of Michael Lewis or the How I Built This podcast. But he is equally successful in depicting the deep and lasting bond between the two men, who go from antagonistic acquaintances to the most important people in each other’s lives, culminating in an unexpectedly affecting finale. Epic in scope and ambition, this novel has been compared to no less than Dickens’ Great Expectations and will be a hit with fans of Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) or Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan (2021).
