I’m afraid I can’t quite decide if I like Michael Lewis’s Boomerang: The Meltdown Tour or not. What did I like about it? As a romp through the crisis-hit economies of Europe – Iceland, Greece and Ireland – it would score high as a travelogue. Lewis, author of earlier bestsellers Liar’s poker and The Big Short, has all the attributes of a good travel writer. He has an eye for detail and an ear for anecdote combined with a stand-up comedian’s sense of timing when it comes to punchlines. Some of his encounters in Greece and Ireland could well set new standards for the genre.
What are my reservations? The problem is that I started reading this book not as a travelogue but as a layman’s guide to the financial crisis in Europe. I am probably being pedantic here but I did expect a rough and ready guide to the complex mix of the diverse forces that seems to bring one economy after another to its knees; I didn’t quite find it. Instead, it seemed to fall back on ethnic caricatures to explain the contours of the continents. I am possibly exaggerating things a tad, but Lewis does seem to suggest that Greece’s current problems stem from the fact that the Greeks are both venal and lazy; Ireland’s banks went belly-up essentially because the Irish are stupid and greedy; the Icelanders are a bunch of oiks who could have avoided their troubles by sticking to fishing rather than dabbling in credit default swaps and so on and so forth.
Let me quote a few lines to underscore my point: “The Greek state was not just corrupt but corrupting…. Everyone is pretty sure everyone is cheating on taxes, bribing politicians, or taking bribes or lying about the value of his real estate. The epidemic of lying and cheating and stealing only encourages more lying, cheating and stealing”. This is Naipaul on speed.
Where does this leave the Germans, who don’t apparently seem to be doing their bit to save Europe? Lewis launches into a long detour (fascinating and, again, very funny) on the German obsession with faeces. As he puts it, “the German word for shit performs a vast number of linguistic duties.” Just as the reader begins to wonder where all this is leading, voila, you have Lewis’ clinching thesis:“Germans long to be near the shit, but not in it. This, as it turns out, is an excellent description of their role in the financial crisis.” This is the kind of sophomoric pseudo-profundity at which Lewis seems to excel.
The funny thing is that at some level, all this is true. The land-grabbing priests of the Vatopaidi seminary in Greece, the utterly deluded financial investors of Iceland or the feckless Irish banks represent the “human” side of their economic problems. This aspect – call it sociology if you like – is just as important to understand as is the cold logic of macroeconomics if one has to get to the nub of the crisis. However, this exploration of the human side is completely devoid of either nuance or empathy. It gets bogged down in a kind of annoying facetiousness (and superficiality, if I may add) that limits the book to just a collection of anecdotes rather than insights. Lewis’ research is lazy and selective — strewn all over the book to prove a point rather than provide genuine understanding.
A couple of other things rankle. There is no attempt, except towards the very end, to explain the euro project itself — the brave but misguided project to create a common currency area for 17 diverse economies that ultimately precipitated the meltdown. Were the economies that abandoned their own currencies just suckered into this deal by the promise of an unending party? Or was there indeed a collective plan to build a stronger, better Europe that could stand up to the might of the United States, a plan that, unfortunately, went terribly wrong due to the turn of events? There is little effort to explain some of the internal contradictions involved in this historic economic experiment and the solutions that can work for the future.
I am happy to concede that perhaps I shouldn’t have been looking for these things in Boomerang. Perhaps there is too much serious stuff on fiscal unions and currency competitiveness going around. Perhaps Lewis consciously wanted to avoid the boring bits, to write a funny book about the funny Europeans and their unfunny crisis that threatens to rock the global financial world. However, I cannot settle for a “greedy Greeks” view of Europe’s problems. Others, I am sure, will and could find this book immensely entertaining — they should buy a copy.
BOOMERANG: THE MELTDOWN TOUR
Michael Lewis
Allen Lane
213 pages; Rs 599