Ben Eastham has spent years co-editing White Review and writing criticism at the vanguard of contemporary art and literature, which means he has watched, up close, the deal that contemporary art makes with power: sponsorship from oil companies, opioid manufacturers, arms dealers; the Louvre Abu Dhabi's geopolitical theatre; artworks as tax instruments. He did not write a polemic. He wrote a novel — and that choice is both the book's ambition and, occasionally, its limitation. The unnamed narrator is an art critic turned reluctant schoolteacher who is offered a nine-month contract with the Morel Foundation, the cultural wing of an arms-manufacturing multinational, to help research and write press releases for the opening of a techno-utopian settlement inside a dome on a Greek island — described by one of his friends as "literally a doomsday bunker for billionaires." His wife has recently died in an unnamed war zone. He takes the job. The novel's central irony is right there in the structure: the man who would certify Morel's glory is the same man whose loss was produced by the same class of violence Morel profits from. The pub scene early in the novel — where the narrator's friend Sybil, an actual painter, casts herself as a demigod-queen and employs him to certify her glory in exchange for fermented coconut water — is the sharpest single image in the book. It does more analytical work in two sentences than most art-world novels manage in two hundred pages. Eastham is not gesturing at power; he is diagramming it. Greece is the right location for exactly the reasons the novel names. Athens gives you the Acropolis as backdrop to statelessness and poverty, and the islands give you the erasure of refugees and climate migrants from the escapist fantasies of the wealthy. The political geography is not decorative — it is load-bearing. A young woman throwing red paint at a painting in a London museum screaming "This is happening, open your eyes!" is the one moment where the novel risks heavy-handedness, but Eastham earns it because the narrator's discomfort at the scene is itself part of the critique. Where the book strains is in the integration of its two ambitions. The cynical, clear-eyed dissection of art-world economics and the emotional inner life of a man haunted by his dead wife are both real, but the novel's resolution demands that they be woven together through a thriller-adjacent plot that culminates in what the Guardian's reviewer aptly calls a "blurry, dream-like conflagration of grief, panic and revenge." It is, as they note, neatly done — too neat. The mechanism that resolves the novel is the least interesting thing about it. The ideas are doing the heavy lifting, and when the plot takes over, it feels like a concession to the form rather than a demand of the material. The sentimentality the reviewer identifies is real but not fatal. This is a debut novel by a critic who knows the world he is writing about at a level of specificity most fiction about the art world conspicuously lacks. The book's diagnosis — that art is structurally captured by the same capital it claims to interrogate — is not a polemic conclusion but the observed texture of the narrator's daily experience. That is harder to write than it looks.
