Billed as a literary thriller from one of the masters of the genre, Scarlett Thomas’s The Runner is a far denser philosophical novel than readers might expect – albeit one built around a propulsive chase. The author transforms ultramarathons into a metaphor for modern capitalism, using the story of a fugitive runner to question what gives life value in a world dominated by money, surveillance and relentless growth.

Capitalism is presented as a race without a finishing line, with running symbolising an economic system that demands endless progression: ‘The whole world is just relentlessly upupup. Why is everything just another hill?’ While adopting the language of hustle culture, Thomas draws attention to the slippery nature of infinite growth: ‘Once you’ve started to lose, it is difficult to stop.’ The fallacy of deferred gratification is also called into question: if you have to ‘earn the good stuff by doing the hard stuff first’, then achievement itself is a form of punishment.

Alongside the running-as-capitalism metaphor, Thomas focuses on the relationship between money and value. Hard cash is the plot’s driving force, with the protagonist Jay on the run from assassins chasing a Bitcoin bounty. But our attention is continually drawn to the nebulous nature of cost: ‘Most of what people sell doesn’t really exist… stocks, shares, bonds.’ Financial systems feel detached from reality: ‘Most of how the world works is what you don’t see.’

Aside from money, then, The Runner’s cast of fringe-dwellers are looking for what gives life value, with religion often surfacing as a viable option. To some, Christianity coexists perfectly with capitalism, citing the parable of the talents as evidence that ‘you’re supposed to come out of this life with more than you came in with’. But Ellie, Jay’s enigmatic love interest, sees money as entirely antithetical to being good, while Jay himself has a fancy to ‘become a Catholic priest and be done with all this’.

Surrealism further unsettles what first appears to be a grounded literary thriller. Mythological figures, exorcisms and Jay’s persistent uncertainty (‘Does he believe in God? If not, then life exists in a void. If so, then he is damned’) sit comfortably alongside cryptocurrency, ultramarathons and business theory. Economics, like faith, is a system of ‘ghosts’, sustained by belief in invisible forces, where value depends on collective acts of imagination.

Although its dense philosophical digressions occasionally threaten to weigh down the narrative, The Runner successfully transforms an exhilarating chase into an examination of meaning under the ‘freewheeling chaos of late capitalism’. Thomas refuses simple answers about money, morality or fulfilment. Instead, she leaves the reader with the unsettling possibility that the pursuit of value is itself what gives life value, which may be the novel’s most compelling insight.