Martin Grzimek

The cover blurb compares this novel to Huxley's Brave New World and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. This is justified, I think, as the story has something of both: a future society where mass entertainment and government control have limited individuality and created a yearning for authentic experience. Like both novels, it suggests that pleasure, not paranoia, will be our undoing. And like both novels, there is, behind the dystopia, a belief in deeper values like beauty and poetry and morality and truth.

The novel starts out as series of letters by a young man written to his girlfriend, who has disappeared. He is employed by a government agency which is in control of the country's entire literary production. With the comforts of the modern age, society evidently has few problems, but its citizens have an insatiable appetite for new experiences--the more authentic, the better. Felix's job is to interview citizens old enough to still have had interesting experiences and record their stories. These oral recollections are sent to a computer, which processes them and makes books out of them, guaranteed to be completely true and authentic.
But something goes wrong with one of the interviews, and Felix ends up enacting a complex sort of fraud which puts him in great danger.
And then, the perspective changes, questioning the reliability of everything Felix has recounted. Is he, in fact, part of a plot to destroy the system? Or is he delusional, making everything up out of a desire to be an author himself, to create, to enact a story?

This is not a challenging or provocative work the way Brave New World must have been in its day. It is, in some ways, less about criticising society than the literary establishment, and it reflects in true postmodern fashion on themes of authorship and authenticity and creativity: can any story be "real" or "true"? Can we even write anything new that isn't merely a recombination of elements that have already been used countless times? What about the passivity of us as readers as consumers?

A beautifully written and engaging novel. While not edgy, the final chapter does, nevertheless, leave the reader with a chill with regard to the consequences of what it would mean for to government to have total surveillance and total control over the media… (meer)