A Refreshing Summer Read
Drayton and Mackenzie gets the clean tech grind right
Every so often, we like to take a close look at literature here at The Instigator. You can see some of our recommendations here, here, here, here, and here. (And please do send us yours!)
While we pride ourselves on being generally well-read, we’re particularly into climate fiction. The best of the genre lets readers imagine different futures. It builds empathy by giving us a new vantage point. And it sketches the futures—the good and bad—that climate and energy choices might actually produce.
But one catch is that sometimes Cli-Fi can slip into sermon territory. You can feel the author’s thesis statement poking through the plot. So it’s a real pleasure to recommend a new novel that never once feels preachy: Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt.
The plot, briefly: James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie meet as college students, drift apart, and then collide again as young consultants at McKinsey in the years around the 2008 financial crisis. Drayton is the disciplined, determined one on track for an early partnership; Mackenzie is the charming, restless one who can’t quite get out of his own way. Sent to Scotland to help shut down a client’s operations, the two of them start wondering if they’re capable of building something instead of just closing things down. That question leads them into a tidal energy startup which, over the course of two decades, evolves into a thriving hydrogen business. Along the way, the book folds in cameos from real figures: Ben Bernanke, Peter Thiel, and my former Goldman Sachs partners Hank Paulson, Lloyd Blankfein, and Mario Draghi all make appearances. There are nods to plenty of others in the tech and finance world whom Starritt clearly knows well.
If only more novelists sought out stories in the grubby, sometimes unglamorous machinery of the real economy—management consulting, venture fundraising, the slow grind of getting a startup from PowerPoint to product. Starritt did his homework here, and it shows. The consulting, fundraising and company-building scenes all ring true.
Just as importantly, the book stays honest about its two leads, and all of the other characters too. Drayton and Mackenzie are ambitious and likable, but they’re also flawed in ways that will feel familiar to anyone who’s spent time around founders, or frankly around any driven, imperfect human being. Nobody here is a saint purely motivated by trying to save the planet. Instead, the lead characters are two guys trying to build something that works, who happen to land on tidal power and, eventually, hydrogen.
And that isn’t so fictitious. The clean energy transition isn’t going to be won by a handful of noble crusaders. It’s going to be built by thousands of ordinary, ambitious, flawed people slogging through consulting decks, performance reviews, term sheets, product setbacks, as well romantic ups and downs. We appreciate a novel that takes that seriously, without turning it into a lecture. The book is fun, funny, absorbing, and worth your time.
More of this kind of story, please.
Onward,
