Tag: novel

Nearly half a bicycle

The atomic theory in Kilburn

This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. You can still see the dry cleaning hanging in the shop, though, so the old function is obviously clinging on. I imagine a bitter conflict in there, between the older sibling who wants to keep the dry cleaner’s going and a more entrepreurial younger one who wants to get into bikes, the coming thing (something about athleisure too – who gets anything dry-cleaned these days?).

In The Third Policeman, an absurdist classic from weird Irish civil servant, journalist and fantasist Flann O’Brien1, set in an unnamed rural community in Ireland before the war, one of his characters meditates on ‘the atomic theory’, which was still pretty new at this point: the surprising idea that matter is actually made of tiny particles called atoms and that, at their boundaries, objects might actually give up some of their atoms in a kind of exchange, blurring their edges a bit.

Sergeant Pluck, senior officer at the police barracks in this community, who keeps up with the latest ideas, has convinced himself that he sees evidence of the atomic theory at work in some locals who spend a little too much time on their bikes2 and are thus taking on something of their nature:

“Michael Gilhaney,” said the sergeant, “is an example of a man that is nearly banjaxed from the principle of the atomic theory. Would it astonish you to hear that he is nearly half a bicycle?”

If I had time I’d expand on this: I’d try to give you something of the awkward status of science after Einstein in post-independence Ireland, dominated by an atavistic Catholic church. Like other small European Catholic nations in this period, Ireland was self-consciously backward, priggishly anti-modern. It took the State decades to overcome its self-satisfied stance on, well, everything.

O’Brien was different: a modernist but also a devout Catholic, deeply sceptical about the actual modern. He often took the church’s side in his columns for the Irish Times3 (which he wrote pseudonymously because he retained his full-time job in the Irish civil service, an institution that retained essentially its colonial form for decades after independence). In 1942, for instance, he somehow managed to attend a lecture by Professor Erwin Schrödinger at the new Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin4 in which the Austrian Nobel Prize-winner, in passing, threw some shade on the idea of causality. Your man was not impressed and wrote, in his column:

“I understand also that Professor Schrodinger has been proving lately that you cannot establish a first cause. The first fruit of this Institute, therefore, has been to show that there are two Saint Patricks and no God.

O’Brien was a brilliant writer, a self-conscious European modernist and an unembarrased advocate for new modes. I hoovered this stuff up when I was an adolescent: he had the oddness and the sly, disorienting humour kids like me were all looking for then. It was Kafka, Burroughs, B.S. Johnson, Vonnegut, Angela Carter and all the other weirdos. But O’Brien was different, more than an oddball: he was a conservative Catholic from the outer fringes. A lot of his stuff was buried and not published until decades later when rediscovered by publishers from the metropole who urgently needed more of this kind of borderline psychedelic stuff in their lists. His rhythms, his alienating settings and his humour could have come from Joyce or Beckett but he’d have run a mile if you’d tried to connect them or to recruit him to a scene or a movement.

His Catholicism meant that O’Brien couldn’t entertain or play with the new, scientific ideas in the way these atheist artists did. He would never have claimed that freedom. The atomic theory was just the kind of idea you can see animating a passage from Joyce but in O’Brien it can only be mocked. This idea, that objects might exchange matter, even at a tiny scale, is, to state the obvious, a profoundly anti-Catholic idea: a kind of blasphemous, material transubstantiation and a denial of the distinctness of God’s creations. It must have upset him profoundly.

Meanwhile, in Kilburn – still the centre of the Irish community in London – I might add that I only know about Sparkling Laundry and Cleaning myself because I cycle past it several times a week on my epic commute5. I had a conversation with my doctor only this morning about the possibility I might be taking on something of the bicycle myself.

  1. I’ve called him Flann O’Brien here but he was born Brian O’Nolan (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote under several names and his Irish Times byline was Myles na gCopaleen. Wikipedia says he wrote science fiction under other names and some more recent collections have included stories by John Shamus O’Donnell, an Amazing Stories contributor who may or may not have been the same man. ↩︎
  2. Don’t forget, in this period the bicycle was also a symbol of the modern: a weapon, a hyper-efficient transportation device, a liberatory technology. ↩︎
  3. O’Brien’s Cruiskeen Lawn columns were a cult read with the Irish Times’ elite readers. They’re often about something of immediate interest in Ireland at the time of publication but they’re some of the smartest and funniest newspaper writing you’ll ever read – and they have become a model for much of this kind of stuff since. Try the collection Best of Myles. ↩︎
  4. Ironically Prof Schrödinger had been brought to Dublin in 1939 by Éamon de Valera as part of an effort to modernise the country’s creaking university system. ↩︎
  5. I might also, self-indulgently, tell you that I’ve occasionally taken as a subject for some poems Quex Road, a stub of a road that links Kilburn High Road with West End Lane a bit South of here.
    ↩︎

Bureacracy in deep space

If you want to understand the state of the art in space-age capitalism you must visit the HR department

A view along a dimly-lit corridor from the film Alien
HR is at the end of the corridor on the right

Everyone knows that it’s in Human Resources that you’ll find the perfect expression of the polished lie of the benign 21st Century workplace. The grim neoliberal orthodoxy of human potential in service of capital lives here: it’s HQ for lean-in corporate orthodoxy. The smiling, dead-eyed culture of compliance-disguised-as-fulfilment that anyone who works for a big firm will recognise. A disciplinary function that thinks it’s a wellbeing project.

There’s a space-faring future HR department at the centre of Olga Ravn’s ‘The Employees’, a 2020 novel subtitled ‘a workplace novel of the 22nd century’. It’s literary science fiction, from hip publisher of translated works Lolli Editions, written during the pandemic (published in November 2020). The bleak, suffocating setting is sketched rather than described – it’s a spaceship, very far from earth, in orbit around a colonised planet that’s been named ‘New Discovery’, and it conjures up the lockdown as vividly as it does all those other spaceships of the collective memory.

The book’s thesis is neat: a spaceship – no matter how advanced its technology, no matter how far into the future or distant from earth it is, no matter how difficult and unsettling its mission – is still a place of work, right? And, when things go wrong, when a discovery on the planet’s surface causes a kind of collective nervous breakdown in the crew and the hierarchy of human and humanoid on board collapses and things start to get nasty, there’ll still need to be some kind of formal investigation, right? Management will need to get involved, send a team, kick off some kind of process?

So the book is a sequence of reports, memos from crew members, gathered by a team sent from earth. And they start kind of bland, empty of tension, cleverly suggesting the complicated economic and social context the crew occupies without describing it (this is not a Kim Stanley Robinson novel). The memos hint at the drama to come and – without spoilers – the tension does build and things do get bad.

The book’s full of subtly-delivered ideas, it has an unexpected emotional charge that builds and there’s real beauty and strangeness in the places we visit, especially in the tantalising glimpse of the surface of New Discovery that we’re offered and in the ‘objects’ encountered there. The language is authentically that of a workplace in crisis and the bloodless, rules-bound culture of human resources and people management described is chilling.

The story is told only by the workers, by the actors in the workplace drama. It’s a one-sided interrogation. We don’t hear the voices of the HR team sent to investigate, the managers who decide how to resolve things (there are evidently no union reps present). The language of the staff interviewed betrays the strangled effort to comply with rules you only vaguely comprehend. And the outcome, the resolution to the problems on-board, is chilling, authentically bureaucratic, brutal – and there’s no right of appeal.

  • I review the books I read on Goodreads – mainly so I don’t forget I’ve read them.

Anyone give me odds?

This may be my weblog’s first authentic scoop. A ‘friend’ (picture removed) – an author and publishing insider – tells me, with some credibility, that Michael Crichton’s Nano-frightener Prey will be followed by two more books – each focused on extinction-level threats to humankind – from Robots and Geneticists respectively (but not necessarily in that order). The implication is that Crichton has made a close reading of uber-worrier Bill Joy’s 2000 Wired article in which he lays out the existential threat from nanotech nasties, self-replicating robots and out-of-control genetic engineering (He’s mostly wrong, of course). Joy’s paranoid-determinist vision will be published as a book next Autumn.