The Floating World by Ben Eastham review, a compelling debut of art’s relation to money and power

Following the death of his wife, a critic-teacher takes a job with an art-washing multinational, in a cinematic novel that is full of ideas

A t the end of a night in a London pub, after last orders have been called, three friends are joking about what role they’d serve on a remote desert island, with no one but their fellow plane crash survivors for company. When one of them, an art critic turned reluctant schoolteacher, says that he would become an artist, he is, naturally, mocked. His friend Sybil, who actually is a painter, casts herself more sensibly as a demigod-queen of the island and employs her newly creative companion to “certify her glory”. “That’s what artists are for,” she says, “I pay you in fermented coconut water and you tell yourself you’re free and drink yourself to death.”

This is about as clear a statement as one could wish for regarding the position of contemporary art as it relates to power: the boot of the latter is placed firmly on the former’s throat. This relationship is the central theme of The Floating World, Ben Eastham’s debut novel, which is narrated by the somewhat hapless and unnamed critic-teacher. And what has led to this existential pub conversation is an unexpected opportunity: following the death of the narrator’s wife in an unnamed war zone, he has been offered a job with the Morel Foundation, an art-washing spin-off of an arms-manufacturing multinational which extracts profit from all corners of a wartorn world while its cultural wing props up the ego of its eponymous overlord CEO.

The narrator is unsure about taking up a position he knows to be morally indefensible, but which pays pretty well. Should he accept the nine-month contract, “helping with research, writing the press releases, editing the publications”, he would move from London to a tiny Greek island, where Morel is building “The Floating World”, a techno-utopian settlement inside a giant dome. A spectacular artistic event is planned to celebrate the official opening of what another of the narrator’s friends calls “ literally a doomsday bunker for billionaires”. Is this really something he wants to be part of?

Eastham knows this artistic milieu inside out. As a co-founder of the visual arts and literature magazine White Review and a busy and perceptive critic, Eastham has spent many years at the vanguard of contemporary art and literature. As a curator and writer, he has witnessed first-hand the tightening bonds between a globalised art market and international finance, from the widespread sponsorship of oil and opiate sellers to the geopolitical game-playing of projects like the Louvre Abu Dhabi, not to mention the use of artworks for money laundering, tax breaks and other kinds of financial engineering. Eastham threads examples of this interdependence throughout the book; sometimes as a nod to the knowing, but often more directly, as when a visit to a London museum is interrupted by a young woman throwing red paint at one of the paintings, screaming, “This is happening, open your eyes!”

The narrator takes the job. He lands first in Athens, where he is welcomed by graffiti decrying the spread of short-term rentals for tourists, written deliberately in English, it is just about the only sign he can understand. Greece is the ideal setting for this book because there is arguably no place in Europe where it is easier to witness the contradictions of a world in which capital moves freely but people do not. In Athens, the most destitute struggle in statelessness and poverty, with the Acropolis as a backdrop. On the islands, victims of war, genocide, exploitation and climate catastrophe are airbrushed out of the escapist fantasies of the rich.

It is to the novel’s immense credit that it manages to make this political awareness more than dutiful stage‑dressing; it is the real heart of the book. Eastham attempts an ambitious balancing act: on one side, the cynical gamesmanship of high-end contemporary art, and on the other, the emotional inner life of a man haunted by the memory of his deceased wife. The story becomes increasingly mysterious and action-packed, and it becomes inevitable that the two strands will be integrated through a conclusive narrative denouement. The form demands, and Eastham obliges with a blurry, dream-like conflagration of grief, panic and revenge. It’s all very cinematic, and neatly done, too neat, maybe, in the end. The Floating World is a book full of ideas and curiosity, but for all its well earned disillusion with the art world, it remains surprisingly sentimental.