by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
Foreword by George Hay Introduction by David Seed
(Liverpool University Press 1999 pp164 np)
Granger is a small-time journalist who is given the opportunity to mingle with the great political and business leaders when he is successful in writing pen-portraits of those men. They (loosely based on Balfour and Joseph Chamberlain) need his "spin" because they are each advancing their own positions, and need support in the country. In turn, the Duc de Mersch is building a company to industrialise Greenland (based on King Leopold's exploitation of the Congo), and needs to raise more and more capital. And Granger becomes more and more involved, as the girl manages to pass herself off as Miss Etchingham Granger, his sister, using her own magnetism to achieve the ends of herself and the future. Granger, unaware of her motives as she intrigues with these men, tries to warn them off, but cannot. She is engaged to Gunard (the Chamberlain figure) when the true situation in Greenland is revealed, leading to the collapse of a bill in the House of Commons - and Prime Minister Churchill's fall - and the collapse of the Greenland company and a run on the stock exchange - Black Monday.
In this world moral collapse and financial collapse are correlatives. It was not just Conrad and Ford who saw this, though Conrad was writing HEART OF DARKNESS at the same time. This is the same vision that Wells had when he wrote TONO-BUNGAY (1909). Sometimes called "the condition of England fiction", Wells (an Englishman), Conrad (Polish born who became a naturalised Briton), and Ford (British born of German stock) saw that there was a wider "condition of Europe" to be considered.