Black Money - Style

Style

Written in understated style, with dry wit and occasional aphorisms ("What you do to others you do to yourself. That's the converse of the golden rule") and without the sentimental biases that sometimes mar the author’s other books, Black Money maintains the speed of a thriller at the same time as it manipulates the reader’s understanding of its characters so as to render them icons of their classes and to lay bare their psychological tropes and moral dimensions. In this respect the book owes much of its vision to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), and it is no accident that Fitzgerald is mentioned once in the text itself: Cervantes and Virginia Fablon share something of Gatsby and Daisy Fay Buchanan. As in Fitzgerald, the glittering surface conceals profound corruption. The denouement is darker than Fitzgerald's work, however.

The compression of the writing augments its emotive force, notably in the complex final scene, which, without having the “jolt” (to use the author’s own word) of The Chill (1964), has an accretive force that gives it even greater power—that of tragedy.