59 pages • 1 hour read
Daniel SilvaA Death in Cornwall
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Destructive Influence of Extreme Wealth
Content Warning: This section mentions the Holocaust.
In A Death in Cornwall, Silva highlights how socioeconomic stratification impacts people’s lives. The wealthiest people in the world, the billionaires, live very different lives than even the upper and middle classes. Silva introduces this theme at the very beginning of the book, in the epigraph from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “The Rich Boy”: “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me” (1). Exceptionally wealthy characters include the clients of Harris Weber and Anna Rolfe. The upper-class characters include Gabriel and Ingrid. Silva also includes the character Amadou Kamara, who is poor, to examine the hierarchies of wealth.
Within Silva’s fictional world, the wealthiest people are often the least ethical. Silva repeats the line “The richest of the rich, the worst of the worst” to describe the 0.1% (273, 385). People in this category include the clients of the law firm Harris Weber, which creates shell companies to allow wealthy people to make money without paying taxes. The list of Harris Weber clients includes “the leader of a Mexican drug cartel” (279), “the billionaire daughter of Angola’s former dictator” (279), and “Valentin Federov, the billionaire investor” (280). Those who make their money through nominally legal means are placed within the same category as drug kingpins and dictators. Within rarefied spaces like the Geneva Freeport—spaces that exist to protect and cater to them—their wealth makes them all equal. Regardless of the sources of their wealth, they are all enmeshed in a financial system that values the amassing of even greater wealth over any concept of the common good.
Anna is aware that her inherited wealth is the result of plunder, and she tries to redeem her family’s legacy by doing good in the world. She is horrified—though not surprised—when she finds a picture of her father with Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, evidence of his support for the Nazi regime and his theft of art from Jewish people imprisoned and killed during the Holocaust. Anna uses her wealth to buy Guarneri and Stradivarius violins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and she devotes her life to mastering these instruments and playing beautifully for audiences. She hopes that creating art and assisting Gabriel in returning art to its rightful Jewish owners can transform her family name.
Gabriel, the novel’s hero, is a wealthy man by most standards, but he nonetheless has to work for his living, unlike the super-rich, whose wealth sustains itself through capital gains. His purchase of a home in Venice leaves him with a “much-depleted account at Mediobanca of Milan” (117). At the end of the novel, Gabriel uses the money he makes by restoring a very valuable painting to buy a cottage in Cornwall. There is a direct correlation between labor and acquisition for him, unlike Anna and the clients of Harris Weber. Ingrid also has to work for what she purchases, but her labor is theft. For instance, a “pair of Harry Winston diamond earrings […] had paid for the BMW” (106): Ingrid turned the theft of earrings into a different commodity. She does not have the kind of generational wealth and power that the 0.1% has.
In contrast with these well-off characters, Silva includes a street vendor in Paris, Amadou. Chiara says that vendors “sell fake handbags because they are desperately poor” (86). This crime only harms “the profits of fabulously wealthy corporations” (86), unlike the crimes of the global financial elite, which harm many lower-class people. Chiara and Gabriel, despite being rather well-off, do not look down on people who don’t have as much wealth and power as they do. Anna actively tries to improve the lives of people who attend her concerts. However, people like Robinson make a living by helping the exceptionally rich obtain more money and avoid paying taxes. He says, “Power and money are all that matters” (327). This ideology finds expression in the greedy and exploitative financial practices described in the novel.
The Commodification of Art
One way that the exceptionally wealthy launder money is through buying and selling art with shell companies. In A Death in Cornwall, the law firm Harris Weber and the Geneva Freeport are part of this art strategy. The art strategy for laundering money can be contrasted with the art crime of forgery. Forging paintings requires extensive knowledge about art, as well as artistic talent, while laundering money through the art market does not require much knowledge on the part of the buyer since expert gallerists and agents are always ready to assist.
Gabriel’s knowledge and skill allow him to imitate the work of famous artists, such as Monet and Van Gogh, convincingly enough to fool the world’s foremost experts. Gabriel’s son is so awed by Gabriel’s talent that he is afraid to attempt to learn how to paint. However, the “crime of forgery requires more than raw artistic talent. The forger must know everything there is to know about the painter he is attempting to imitate” (118). For instance, Gabriel has to know what kinds of canvases and paints they used, as well as how to convincingly forge the signatures of the painters. He works closely with Naomi, who creates “fictitious provenances for six forged paintings” for each of his paintings (118). This work involves the theft of intellectual property and potentially the defrauding of buyers, but within the novel’s moral worldview, the artistic skill involved offers a partial moral justification. In addition, Gabriel refuses to make money through his forgeries, using them only in the pursuit of justice. He rips up the six forged paintings once the Picasso they are trying to obtain is taken from the Geneva Freeport.
In contrast, the super-rich clients of Harris Weber see art objects as just another investment. Harris Weber creates two shell companies—one to buy and one to sell. The art stays in the Geneva Freeport. When Anna sells Gabriel’s forged paintings, “Galerie Ricard [is] the buyer of record” (134). Her name is not involved in the sale, and this allows her to avoid paying taxes. Anna’s sale to Ricard allows Gabriel to locate the missing Picasso and unveil the unethical business practices of Harris Weber.
The clients of Harris Weber are not using art to improve the world or even their reputations. Publicly collecting and exhibiting art is a way of gaining cultural capital. For instance, Lovegrove helps an anonymous client acquire an “art collection that would confer instant sophistication and thus grant him entree into the upper levels of British and Continental society” (74). Cultural capital comes through gaining the respect of people who belong to the upper class through knowledge about art and other forms of culture—the kind of knowledge that forms a core value for both Gabriel and Anna. By contrast, the art traded through Harris Weber’s shell companies often ends up in secure storage facilities where no one sees it. As long as it remains in this exploitative market, all cultural value is stripped from it, and it is reduced to a mere commodity.
The Ubiquity of Political Corruption
Silva traces the connections between the global financial elite and the world of British politics, illustrating how ultra-wealthy individuals and corporations use their money to buy favors from elected officials, thus corrupting a democratic political system intended to serve the public interest. London is “the money laundering capital of the world […] it has rotted our politics to the core” (350), says SIS chief Graham. The center of money laundering is also called the “London Laundromat” (376). Corrupt elites conspire against politicians, like Hillary Edwards, who try to address the crime of money laundering. However, thanks to Gabriel’s work on the case, some corrupt politicians have to leave British politics and, in some cases, Britain itself.
Prime Minister Edwards is framed as being involved in the money-laundering scheme, but she is innocent. Samantha is manipulated into writing an article for The Telegraph about how Edwards received a political contribution from a corrupt Russian billionaire. However, Edwards says that she had “nothing at all to do with approving that contribution from Valentin Federov” (363). It is, in fact, Radcliff who works with Federov and Lucinda Graves. Radcliff “accepts a one-million-pound contribution from a pro-Kremlin Russian businessman that leads to his own resignation and the resignation of Prime Minister Hillary Edwards” (357). After he resigns, he gets £10 million more from Federov. These two donations are part of a conspiracy by Lucinda and Harris Weber to remove Edwards from her role as prime minister. While the conspirators succeed in forcing Edwards’s resignation, they are not successful in replacing her.
Lucinda, Radcliff, and others at Harris Weber work to replace Edwards with Hugh Graves, “a tough-on-immigration Brexiteer, popular with the Party’s increasingly populist rank and file” (315). Graves is a fountain of meaningless political soundbites; the money and power behind him is Lucinda. Without Gabriel, Graves would have become prime minister. However, Samantha retracts her initial article and publishes a series of new pieces that implicated Lucinda. A recording of Lucinda talking to Radcliff is leaked to the press: “[T]here was no mistaking her throaty contralto” (373). Once the evidence mounts, and Gabriel threatens to expose Lucinda’s role in Charlotte’s murder, Lucinda tells her husband to drop out of the race for prime minister. They move to Malta, he writes a novel, and the “reinvention of Hugh Graves as a literary figure—not to mention the appalling size of his advance—ignite[s] a firestorm of criticism in the British press” (388). Lucinda and Hugh Graves will never be part of British politics again, it seems.
At the end of the novel, Jonathan Lancaster, a friend of Gabriel’s, becomes prime minister and gives Edwards a position in the government. Silva’s protagonist reveals the conspiracy and ousts its members. In his Author’s Note, Silva explains that he based his fictional politicians on Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. This final theme is his fictional representation of a real-world problem.
