REVIEW | A mysterious death in a gilded city

The thing about narrative non-fiction is that there is no spoiler alert. You know where the story ends from the beginning. In London Falling, Patrick Radden Keefe gives you the details upfront, in the first few pages. A young man is filmed by MI6 surveillance cameras leaping off the fifth floor of an affluent residential building, Riverwalk, into the Thames. His body is found hours later in the mud of the river’s low tide. He is shirtless and his jaw is broken.

What you learn upfront as well is that this middle-class English lad, aged 19, had an alter ego as a Russian oligarch’s son. However, it takes the entire book to attempt the “how” — how he got to that point of desperation or fear; the “who’ — who was involved; and the “why”. Radden Keefe focuses his lens on a riveting and disturbing tale of slick new wealth, the darkness of the London underworld, and the tragedy of a family grieving the untimely loss of a son.

Zac Brettler, the young British teen, in his double life as Zac Ismailov, is caught up in a very different London to the one he grew up in. Indeed, Radden Keefe focuses on the changing nature and face of London over the decades through his interrogation of the Brettler family and the other characters. In the interview, the author further suggests that while London is the setting, this is the story of many large, global cities — cities where wealth, violence and deceit play out hand-in-hand in disturbing but familiar narratives.

As the imposter Russian, Zac creates an entire world; a world which elicits great interest from diverse players — at best dodgy, at worst deeply criminal. Radden Keefe suggests that Zac Brettler’s death, whilst recorded as a suicide, is intrinsically linked to two characters Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma — they were in the apartment when he died. In fact, Brettler’s relationship with them is described by the author as that of a “fatted calf”.

The young man who faked a bank account of millions died with nothing but a few pounds to his name and no answer to the real reason behind his death.

In the words of London’s great bard, Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage/And all the men and women merely players/They have their exit and entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts”, London Falling offers rigorous research into the history of the actors on this stage, their “exits and entrances”. It digs deep into different pasts. We go back generationally into the lives of the players as they originally arrived in London to make it their home. This is a narrative that takes us back to Eastern Europe, Uganda, and India. In trying to understand the tragedy and horror of the suicide, we are brought more closely to the actions of the present through the fabric of the past.

London Falling highlights the culture of the last decade, one which celebrates the maxim “fake it ‘til you make it”. Our shock at the Netflix Tinder swindlers and corporate scammers on social media is often less at their activity and more at the fact that they get away with it — and sometimes we are shocked when they don’t. Zac Brettler/Ismailov didn’t. And yet the tragedy of Brettler is borne by his parents and sibling, and is further validated by the epic failure of the London Metropolitan Police to pull together all the loose ends and answer the questions surrounding his death, according to the author. The young man who faked a bank account of millions died with nothing but a few pounds to his name and no answer to the real reason behind his death.

In closing I am reminded of the song by the Clash, London Calling, on which I assume Radden Keefe made a play for his own title. As the lyrics go, “London calling to the underworld” — so too is the reader taken into some of the very darkest corners of this city.

• London Calling is published by Picador