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84K

door Claire North

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The penalty for Dani Cumali's murder: £84,000. Theo works in the Criminal Audit Office. He assesses each crime that crosses his desk and makes sure the correct debt to society is paid in full. These days, there's no need to go to prison - provided that you can afford to pay the penalty for the crime you've committed. If you're rich enough, you can get away with murder. But Dani's murder is different. When Theo finds her lifeless body, and a hired killer standing over her and calmly calling the police to confess, he can't let her death become just an entry on a balance sheet. Someone is responsible. And Theo is going to find them and make them pay. --amazon.com.… (meer)
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Neither an easy or a cheerful read, Claire North's 84K is a dystopian thriller set in a near-future England which has surrendered itself entirely to the attractions of business. In a Faustian pact, the Government has handed over all its functions to The Company, and given it a free hand in how it carries those functions out. The Company collects taxes, and hands back to Government what it sees fit. Citizens are judged by how much they are fiscally worth and how much insurance they carry. Any crime can be bought off, if you have the money or the insurance cover. Victimhood is assessed on the victim's worth to society; so murder may attract an indemnity of hundreds of thousands of pounds - or a lesser sum, like the £84,000 of the title. If your cover is good enough, of course, you can meet that indemnity easily. But if you're poorer, then incurring an indemnity for some minor or petty infringement could break you. Imagine that you were suddenly landed with a bill for, say, £7,500 out of nowhere. People on moderate incomes might struggle to meet that; people with low or no income would find it beyond them, and so the alternative - indentured servitude, or 'the patty line' - is imposed.

By the time of this novel, the system is well entrenched, and opposition to it appears both pointless and ineffective. Our protagonist - let's call him "Theo Miller" - had humble origins but now works in the Criminal Audit Office, assessing the value of lives taken or indemnities due. But when a childhood friend is murdered, and her £84,000 indemnity is paid by a corporate assassin almost out of petty cash, Miller feels obliged for a number of reasons to follow up the case, even when his superiors disapprove.

The story is told in multiple timelines and in a stream of consciousness style which can be unsettling, as most of the characters don't have well-formed consciousnesses to begin with and never seem to be able to complete a train of thought. We are stuck with the awful reality of a (vey well-realised) society which allows the 1% all the luxuries they could want, at the expense of making the 99% live in a dystopia. "Theo Miller" moves uneasily through this world - he is a well-drawn but ineffective character - until about two-thirds of the way through when the tone of the novel changes abruptly and instead of moving amongst the 99%, we are dealing with the 1%. The non-linear narrative adds another dimension and keeps the reader alert as the pieces fall into place.

About half-way through this book, I considered what I had learned about the society we were being shown. The "patty line" - which started out preparing burgers for fast food, but has since expanded to cover any menial labour that supports the economy - provides the basis for all of society. Those on the patty line cannot get off, as they never earn enough to repay their indemnity. They can be bought and sold, so the indentured servitude is actually slavery. And slaves are dispensable - either thrown out when they become too expensive to employ, or discarded if they fall victim to one of the many failures of (non-existent) health and safety rules - because such things were dropped by The Company long ago as being uneconomic. Everybody knows that this is the case, but no-one takes any notice and conveniently brushes it under the carpet

So - a society whose economic activity is built on disposable slave labour, and whose citizens know but look the other way. The parallels to Nazi Germany are unmistakeable. Yet the ghastly corporatism was arrived at through high-placed individuals feathering their own nests at the expense of everyone else. 84K should be widely read, because there are those who would see it as a utopia rather than a dystopia, who would see in the attitudes of the 1% values that they would consider admirable. The rest of us should read this book, and take its lessons, especially as to the ease that the slippery slope can offer. The style of the novel may put some off - it is not straightforward - but the picture is too important to ignore. ( )
1 stem RobertDay | Sep 23, 2023 |
https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/84k-by-claire-north/

I’m a big fan of Claire North’s work anyway, but this is a bit different – a well-realised near-future dystopian England, where crime and social transgression have been transformed into accounting units (along with the privatisation of most public services) and the underclass is oppressed by cosy collusion between big business and government. Our protagonist, a minor cog in the bureaucracy of punitive taxation, is moved by a shadow from his own past to begin fighting back against the system. A couple of interlocking plot lines, so that you can look at the story from slightly different angles. Grim but convincing. ( )
  nwhyte | May 25, 2022 |
This was a DNF for me. Multiple starts and I just can't.

I love or like many of her other books but for some reason found this impossible. The opening seemed to be a series of false starts that weren't going anywhere and eventually I lost patience.

I won't give a star rating since I didn't finish.
  Sunyidean | Sep 7, 2021 |
I should have liked this. THe concept is great and there's a lot of good world building. I don't mind the choppy writing that much, and I like overlapping timelines. But it felt a little sluggish, and the ending was a little too much "I don't know quite where to take this so let's take a common dystopian ending." ( )
  arosoff | Jul 11, 2021 |
How much is a life worth? Theo Miller knows something about that. He works at the Criminal Audit Office assessing the cost of things like theft, arson, battery, murder. To assess the cost of a murder, for example, you have to see how much the life taken was worth, discounting for things like criminal history, prospects for future productiveness, drug habits, etc. Some lives just aren’t worth all that much. Not in Theo Miller’s society at least. Not since nearly all companies got subsumed by The Company and the government contracted out most of its responsibilities to The Company as well. It’s a nice tight fit — the government and The Company — and if it means a large amount of collateral wastage of human life, well, that doesn’t matter so much if those lives weren’t all that valuable to begin with, or more precisely, not that valuable once The Company got through with them. It’s a society begging to be blown up and, strangely, it looks like Theo Miller might just have to be the one to do it. Well, if he really were Theo Miller that is…

This slightly futuristic dystopian Britain is both frighteningly plausible and laughably implausible. The trouble is that it’s rather difficult to ascertain which is which. And it may be too much for the complex interweaving plot lines to accommodate. Because, very unusually for Claire North, this story takes an inordinate amount of time to get airborne. I would say nearly a hundred pages. Of course once it does find its wings, it soars. But there is a troubling weightiness to the pacing and a certain ponderousness to the characterization of this distasteful near-Britain. Rather than becoming a high-concept thriller, the novel is pulled down by belaboured comparison to a world which, frankly, might not be that much better. It’s as though the social message took precedence over the tightness of the story or the need to generate sympathy for some of the characters.

Despite reservations on this novel, I still find North’s writing electrifying. She can be so deft. So I’m still going to gently recommend it even though I wasn’t completely whelmed. It’s still worth it to be in Claire North’s company for a time. ( )
  RandyMetcalfe | Nov 28, 2020 |
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» Andere auteurs toevoegen

AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Claire Northprimaire auteuralle editiesberekend
Kenny, PeterVertellerSecundaire auteursommige editiesbevestigd
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The lift, as it climbed to the fifth floor, rattled and bumped against the shaft. Sometimes you heard bits falling: a bolt or a piece of chain, vanishing down into an unknown abyss below, but whatever the component was it clearly wasn't that important. Theo took the stairs.
But as the years went by, anger had faded. Most things faded, given time.
We lost a lot of lecturers, though, when the new system came in. They said that the criteria meant they had to be nice to their students, instead of making them learn. They said that the less homework they gave, the better their overall assessments. The better their overall assessments the more money they could make. Everyone's gotta eat.
Protect us, Lord, from the evils that come in the dark protect us from the world that claws at our edges protect us from change and from pain and from evil and from … After, they went home to play Xbox.
When my son sold the government tax service to the Company, a lot of people got extremely rich. I'd say there were over a hundred people who became billionaires overnight, and another thousand or more who are now millionaires courtesy of their shrewd investments. But that's all. A thousand people enriched and the Company now owns the country. A single stroke of the pen and they own everything. They own the law, the judges, the hospitals, the schools, the roads, the police, the army and the government. They own it all, and maybe that's good, maybe that's what we need, to be efficient to be … But it's not.
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The penalty for Dani Cumali's murder: £84,000. Theo works in the Criminal Audit Office. He assesses each crime that crosses his desk and makes sure the correct debt to society is paid in full. These days, there's no need to go to prison - provided that you can afford to pay the penalty for the crime you've committed. If you're rich enough, you can get away with murder. But Dani's murder is different. When Theo finds her lifeless body, and a hired killer standing over her and calmly calling the police to confess, he can't let her death become just an entry on a balance sheet. Someone is responsible. And Theo is going to find them and make them pay. --amazon.com.

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