When John Lanchester was a child growing up in Hong Kong during the 1960s, he was afraid of automated teller machines. Above all, he was frightened of the cashpoint at the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank's headquarters at 1 Queen's Road Central, where his father worked.
'I remember it vividly,' the 48-year-old novelist says in London. 'This was around 1970 and it was literally the first cashpoint in the whole of Hong Kong. It was on the ground floor. My father's office was two floors up. He didn't bat an eyelid. But I found it very troubling.'
The young Lanchester's anxiety did not stem simply from the novelty of the newfangled machine, but from an embryonic fear of modern economics.
'For people my age, cashpoints are a good Rorschach test. They reveal a lot about what we think money is and how it works.
'An American friend of mine loved cashpoints. She thought they handed out free money. For me, they immediately tapped into what could go wrong. There was something unnatural about them. Would they give us too much cash?'
As the global economic meltdown has proved, it was the first, the laissez-faire attitude, that won the day - until the cashpoints ran dry, that is. As the dust settles, however briefly, it is cautious commentators such as Lanchester who are beginning to analyse where it all went wrong.
Enter his new book, Whoops! Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay, an incisive, sobering, funny and often brilliantly irreverent dissection of the recent economic upheaval and its many aftershocks. Not many books begin by juxtaposing epigraphs from John Maynard Keynes and Spinal Tap's David St Hubbins: 'It's such a fine line between stupid and clever.'
