'The Fear Index' by Robert Harris

The financial markets are crashing around our ears and to this end, hedge funds, such as the fictionalised one run by physics genius Alexander Hoffman in The Fear Index have sprung up to make money betting against the success of the market.

Needless to say, Hoffman is a very rich man indeed and like most rich men in thrillers, he has made a number of enemies, despite his reclusive lifestyle in the company of his wife Gabrielle.

After a brutal assault at his own home by a mystery assailant, Hoffman's life rapidly collapses as Robert Harris explores the psychological deterioration of  a man brought to ruin by his own invention - the VIXAL 500 - a computer with an algorithm  designed to make money off the failure of other companies.

The story explores the question of which of these adversaries is the greater threat to Alexander Hoffman? The computer that he has created, which threatens to wreck the company it built, or the men who are making threats on his life? In his concussed, confused state, Hoffman makes a series of  dreadful decisions that would hardly be typical of an average billionaire physics genius.

His friendship with his business partner Hugo Quarry is an example of this. He trusts Hugo utterly despite the strange, amoral world that Hugo inhabits, filled with sleazy affairs and cocaine. This slightly stretches suspension of disbelief in the book and it is unlike Harris to place such a sensational character at the centre of one of his novels.

Hoffman's relationship with his wife is strained and whilst their interplay is more credible, it relies on the notion that Gabrielle is willing to put up with an increasingly distant husband. They also seem like an unlikely match. Gabrielle is hot headed and difficult, an artist who takes impulsive decisions with the kind of disdain that only the very rich are capable of.

By contrast, Alex is listless and often silent. His social skills are minimal and whilst Robert Harris always gets Hugo to cover for him with shareholders or even with his wife, it does seem a unlikely that a man who had made quite so much money would be lacking in social graces.

Whilst all of this contributes to a functional, slow burning thriller, the novel is not as well characterised as Lustrum or Fatherland by the same author. These slightly wooden characters let down a story which is otherwise timely and well written.

Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the image used in this review and will remove it at the request of the rights holder.

'The Dark Knight Trilogy' directed by Christopher Nolan

These dark, moody crime films form without question the most important cinematic trilogy of the last twenty years. In partnership with Christian Bale, Christopher Nolan has constructed a psychologically complex, often borderline sociopathic Batman - a damaged hero who is not so very far removed from the villains he fights.

In Batman Begins, we are presented with a summary of the incidents that created Batman, from the death of Bruce Wayne's parents as a boy, to encountering his mentor and future nemesis Ra's al Ghul. This volume confronts Wayne's relationship with grief in forensic detail, as he learns to use his anger with his parents killer for positive ends, though this only comes about after Rachel Dawes, a love from his past, shows him the error of his ways. Wayne later learns to his cost that he had underestimated Ra's commitment to what he sees as 'true justice'.

Batman's main ally in his fight against Ra's is of course his butler Alfred Pennyworth and I am not sure that I have ever seen Michael Caine more perfectly cast in his long career than in this role. He is a surrogate father for Bruce Wayne with a no-nonsense east end attitude to telling him what he needs to hear. Throughout the trilogy, Alfred appears as a calming influence to Bruce, reminding him that underneath the mask he is just a man.

Another series regular is Morgan Freeman as Lucius Fox, who arms Bruce Wayne for his night time crusades. Fox enjoys many of the best comic moments in the series, usually in the form of pithy remarks about the armaments that he provides. Yet, perhaps his best moment is the excoriating remark he makes to Coleman Reese, a man who threatens to unmask Batman - 'Let me get this straight, you think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante, who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to blackmail this person? Good luck.'

Batman's other ally is Jim Gordon, a world weary cop played with a kind of sad resignation by Gary Oldman, who sees Gotham City collapsing around him from corruption and indifference. With the help of Batman, he uses his power to resist the spread of organized crime. By the beginning of the second volume, The Dark Knight, Gordon has, with the help of new District Attorney Harvey Dent, managed to imprison most of the city's criminals.

The second volume of the trilogy introduces Dent as Gotham's saviour, the man elected as DA to clear the streets of the criminals left standing after Batman's rampages. His idealistic mission is to rid the city of crime once and for all, a mission that will release a horror upon the city that Gordon, Batman and Dent are entirely unprepared for. Dent also fails to realise that he is a man with much to lose as he is in love with the aforementioned Rachel Dawes.

Under the stewardship of Katie Holmes in Batman Begins, Dawes is a friend of Bruce Wayne who has never entirely reciprocated his romantic feelings for her. Due to her idealistic temperament and uncompromising principles, she proves to be a valuable ally of Batman, whose true identity is concealed from her until late in the film. Yet, Katie Holmes' performance is a little wooden and lacks something of the spark that Maggie Gyllenhaal would later bring to the role in The Dark Knight.

It is only during Gyllenhaal's portrayal of Dawes that we perceive why two men as radically different as Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent would chase her. Even though the character has something of a 'damsel in distress' element to her storyline, she is ultimately a woman in control of her own destiny, until that is robbed from her by the whims of a maniac.

This maniac is of course The Joker, played with an unhinged (and in hindsight, given the fate of the actor, perhaps tragic) psychosis by Heath Ledger. His Joker possesses an almost supernatural ability for exposing the dark side of his enemies. He brings Batman closer than ever to crossing his moral boundaries with a campaign of anarchy to bring down every organisation in Gotham City, including the ones he supposedly allies himself with.

It seems that The Joker's madness is also contagious, as it destroys the lives of Harvey Dent and Bruce Wayne, plunging the two into a grief from which only one escapes. Nolan pulls no punches in the closing scenes of The Dark Knight as the twin themes of physical violence and mental disintegration are given a full examination, especially in the case of Dent.

Shocked by these events, the citizens of Gotham inaugurate an era of relative calm, inspired by the false idol Harvey Dent, whom Jim Gordon is forced to revere in an annual speech on 'Harvey Dent Day' - a public holiday in his honour.

The Dark Knight Rises opens on this day, with Gordon reciting these lies that he tells every year for the sake of peace in the city. The hated Batman, supposedly responsible for the crimes of Dent, has forced Bruce Wayne into hiding on his estate. Eight years have passed since the events of The Dark Knight and it is quickly made clear that Wayne has become a recluse, having been forced to bury Batman.

Not that he is allowed to stay in hiding for long, as a masked thug appears by the name of Bane, enforcing the will of a businessman who wants to take over Wayne Enterprises. However, Bane's real agenda is always well hidden from those he manipulates. Tom Hardy does an excellent job of creating an angry human being whose single minded focus on the destruction on Gotham is driven by a hatred of society. At times it is difficult to hear his lines, but they are delivered with such venom that there is never any doubt about what he believes.

Initially, he is assisted in this task by Selina Kyle (Catwoman in all but name) played by Anne Hathaway, an opportunist thief who finds the anarchy that Bane promises to be an appealing prospect, seeing it as good for her business. That is until she finds that it does not suit her as well as she had assumed and that, to her surprise, she has a sense of morality. On the whole, Hathaway does well in this role, portraying a woman who shares Bane's contempt for authority but not his mission of destroying it.

Overall, The Dark Knight Rises offers a fitting end to a trilogy that has entirely changed the public perception of Batman. After the camp, late 90's disaster of Batman and Robin, The Caped Crusader looked to have hung up his cowl for good. Thanks to Christopher Nolan, not only has the character been resurrected but completely transformed. These complex psychological thrillers may be superhero films but they really follow the troubles of imperfect men and women, whose divisions between hero and villian are often not as easy to perceive as they first seem.

And despite the often melancholy themes of these films, all of them leave the audience with renewed hope. The rise of The Dark Knight was indeed something to behold.

Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to the photographs used in this entry and will remove them at the request of the rights holder.