The Scorpion in the Diamond Case: Andrew Hunter Murray on the Allure of Fictional Billionaires

There are very few clean ways to become a billionaire, and – by all accounts – very few ways to stay sane once you are one. 

The odds are you’re not a billionaire yourself, any more than I am. I don’t mean this as a criticism; by most sane metrics it’s a compliment. But even if you’re reading this on the deck of your superyacht, your helicopter’s rotors decelerating as you take a cocktail made of highly endangered Amazonian flowers from one of your retinue of quiescent and model-hot staff… even in that case, I suspect you’re not substantially happier than the rest of us. And this is precisely why authors like me, and readers around the world, are drawn to people like you.

You might be one of the very few billionaires who have pulled off the happiness trick. Maybe you invented a medicine with no side-effects which changed the world exclusively for the better, are slowly giving your money away, and are living in relative simplicity, in harmonious relations with your extended family. Maybe you simply invested in mobile phones in the nineties, Filofaxes in the eighties, or bell-bottoms in the seventies, and have maintained a sense of proportion about your eye-popping, historically anomalous good fortune. Maybe your diamond shoes have been heavy enough to keep your feet on the ground. 

But a large enough mass of money tends, over time, to deform gravity around the holder. Eventually, the ordinary rules of personal physics no longer apply. And that’s why extravagant wealth is so good for fiction. It transforms, or can transform, quite ordinary people into monsters. Greed, fear, resentment, desire, ambition… this is what great books are made of. 

Consider the many novels which, if not exactly recommending we eat the rich, nonetheless encourage us to give them a good nibble. You might be an early nineteenth-century gentleman with more money than God but no idea how to make friends (hello, Mr Darcy). Maybe you’re a modern philanthro-pervert who has all the cash in the world but still can’t find an equal match, resorting instead to picking up impressionable young women in hardware stores (good evening, Christian Grey).

The same story recurs time after time on screen – just think of Succession, Triangle of Sadness, of the wretched guests at the White Lotus resorts, whose Tripadvisor reviews must be a sight to behold.  

What causes this? Is it pure envy, a desire to see people with so much more than us kicked for their luck? A fair bit, I’d guess. But there’s more to it than that. These privileged, murky worlds contain a crucial observation about human nature: that every one of us is capable of unhappiness. Madame Bovary, Undine Spragg… There is something powerful and true in the idea that even the most gilded outer lives conceal private misery. Why? Because in those murky mirrors we see the reflection of brighter truths – that happiness doesn’t require a yacht, and that the greatest unhappiness of all is the eternal, unquenchable yearning for more. The Ancient Greeks knew it, with their myths of eternal torment; now we know it too, this time with the Roy family. 

Another reason for contemporary novels’ billionaire predilection is very simple: money means complication, and complication enables good fiction. Even the rest of us are ill-equipped to cope with a high street’s worth of choices for lunch; imagine having to pick which continent you’ll dine on before you’ve even seen a menu. In a jungle of choice over the simple things, the big things, or the meaning of life itself, unhappiness will growl in the undergrowth. 

Finally, of course, the privileged have more to lose, and when their desires are mutually incompatible – for more wealth and simple love, for true respect and the fear of their subordinates – then, again, novel-propelling conflicts arise. Whatever the cause of the complications, we readers know there is something rotten in the state of Denmark and we won’t be happy until we’ve truffled it out. 

Most dangerous of all, perhaps, are the privileged with a single mission. When I was writing my own billionaire, the enigmatic John Pemberley, who has retreated from a broken Britain to an island off the coast and started constructing a perfect world, I gave him a small but distinct spark of the messianic. Because if you truly did have the money to buy whatever you wanted – including the silencing of all critical voices – then where exactly might you end up? These characters go there, so we don’t have to. They are old-fashioned warnings to the rest of us. 

The one thing we can all agree on is that they must be having a bad time, the guests at the White Lotus or the mysterious Pemberley on his remote Scottish isle. They must be secretly tormented. Because the alternative – that with great wealth comes great tranquillity, and that the people who own so much more than we ever will are genuinely contented and balanced and simply having a much better time than the rest of us – now that really would be disconcerting.