“The Devil’s Company” spins on corporate greed and the war between domestically produced goods and cheaper imports. It sounds like current events. But David Liss is writing of the machinations within the East India Co. and threats to the silk and wool-weaving trades in 18th century England.
The tale’s narrator, a character familiar to readers of “A Conspiracy of Paper” and “A Spectacle of Corruption,” is Benjamin Weaver. A Jew and a former boxer, Weaver ostensibly makes his living tracking down thieves — though he is not so righteous as to be above shady dealings. His knowledge of the streets, his connections and his willingness to use his fists are usually enough to keep him safe enough, if not completely out of trouble. But the web entangling him this time may be too complex and too finely wrought for him to fully escape.
In November 1722, Weaver is on a gambling mission. It’s a setup designed to extract revenge on behalf of another. Jerome Cobb has hired Weaver to entice a man into a high- stakes card game. He is staked with 1,200 pounds and assured that the game will be rigged in his favor. The game is indeed rigged, but not as Weaver had been told.
Weaver reports back to Cobb, only to find out that not only is he expected to repay the money but also that Cobb has bought up the debts of those closest to him. His only recourse is to do Cobb’s bidding. His first assigned task is to break into the impenetrable offices of the East India Co.
Liss is a standout in his ability to bring a period to life, and to find parallels between past and present. He writes of silk workers rioting against the company, saying, “There were men of power in the kingdom, and in the city in particular, who feared that the East India Co.’s imports would permanently harm the trade in native British cloths and enrich a single company at the expense of a national industry.
” Thus the violence of the silk workers and the machination in Parliament of the wool interest had proved, when combined, a reasonable counter to the might of the greedy schemers of Craven House (the company).”
Conspiracies and corporate corruption are common fodder for thrillers, but Liss’ take is unique in both setting and detail.
Speaking by phone from San Antonio, while taking a break from his usual coffee shop writing routine, he said he was initially drawn to the topic while in graduate school. He was working on a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia. The program was “very historically based and culturally based,” he said, looking at literature “through the lens of other cultural artifacts.” His work included the study of “newspapers and magazines . . . to look at a broader context. Books existed as other cultural statements. When I became interested in the link between literature and finance, I read what I could of 18th-century Britain.” He was intrigued, he said, by the way money and debt were presented. “After a while, I realized I was interested in how people aspire to and desire money.”
Research is key. “I rely on the work of other people who dig more deeply into the archives. I read a lot of . . . economic history. The data you can mine from that when you put it in the lives of characters can be exciting stuff.”
“The Devil’s Company” is as distinguished by the compelling voice of its narrator as it is by its vibrant detail. Liss said that the original germ for the character was Jewish pugilist Daniel Mendoza “in a very vague way. When I was researching chapters of the dissertation, I read Mendoza’s memoir.”
He was an interesting character, and Liss said he took certain elements from his life and moved him to the beginning of the 18th century. “I needed to make him an outsider in as many ways as possible. I needed him to go into places that were unfamiliar to him, as a way of explaining things to the contemporary reader . . . the character grew out of the way I wanted to tell the story.”
Weaver’s religious identity is central to his character, and Liss said this aspect of the character would make him even more of an outsider, rendering London even more unfamiliar and unwelcoming. And, he added, that early 18th century England was an interesting moment in Jewish identity that he wanted to explore.
“For all the anti-semitism that Benjamin Weaver encounters, (18th century England) is probably the best place to be, the most tolerant of all European society . . . you begin to see the first time in the modern world, Jewish assimilation into mainstream culture.”
Liss said that writing “The Devil’s Company” was the most fun he’s had writing a book and that he finds Benjamin Weaver’s world a rich one. “I just love 18th-century England. There are so many stories that reflect on the world we live in now.
“Weaver is a great way to get at this . . . One of the hardest things to get right is the voice. Having done that already opens things up. The plot came very quickly and easily, almost fully formed in one session. Things change as you write, but things remained remarkably intact. I felt like I knew what I was doing the whole time, which is rare.”
The result is a novel that Liss describes — accurately — as creepily prescient. Its material seems familiar: a large corporation comfortable with the government, native industries suffering because of imports, markets being shaped by growing global demand. All things that, then and now, raise conflict, extract human costs and make for a great story.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who lives in Centennial.
Fiction
The Devil’s Company, by David Liss, $25
