Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

Claire North, 84K

“The man called Theo Miller” has fallen afoul of his employers. He works in the Criminal Audit Office, and his job is assessing fines for crimes—£30,000 for rape, £84,000 for murder, £400,000 for “acting against corporate interests.” He lives a quiet life and avoids making waves, for one simple reason, he isn’t Theo Miller. He killed Theo Miller and assumed his identity. But someone from his old life has just resurfaced.

The title of British author Claire North’s latest novel deliberately channels George Orwell. But the world she creates more resembles Terry Gilliam’s 1985 comic dystopia Brazil, without the comedy. A massive mega-corporation has overtaken society, and government has become an extension of corporate interests. Everything has been reduced to pound signs and price tags, including human life. It’s Theo Miller’s job to assign the price.

Into his carefully controlled life comes Dani Cumali, whom Theo knew before he became Theo. They had a teenage fling, before corporate interests drew them into different worlds. Something happened since then, something that changed Dani’s life forever, and she wants Theo, with his government connections, to look into it. She never says she’s blackmailing him, but the threat of exposure looms over everything she says.

This story unfolds on two parallel tracks. In one, the past, Theo tries to juggle Dani’s demands with his steady bureaucratic job, while denying to himself how he’s culpable for the disadvantaged situation Dani has fallen into. In the present, a secretive woman, Neila, finds Theo beaten and bloody in the street, and nurses him back to health on her houseboat. Part of the story’s driving mystery is, how do these two strands ultimately join together?

North’s prose style takes some getting used to. She writes in a vernacular, conversational style reminiscent of David Mamet or Harold Pinter, that probably sounds more realistic if read aloud. She enjambs paragraph breaks mid-sentence, uses looping non-standard syntax, and wanders on cow paths. This creates a certain intimacy, but also requires more than usual concentration to read. I’m a theatre guy, and even I found following her sentences taxing.

Claire North

Her voice certainly doesn’t help North’s low-key storytelling. Theo Miller has build a safety net comprised entirely of going unnoticed and not rocking the boat, and North embodies that in her prose: it takes chapter upon chapter to convince Theo to do anything. When he finally does, the results are horrifying—but then, sure enough, Theo finds some way to stumble back into his habitual inactivity.

Dani wants poor, hapless Theo to find the daughter the state stole from her. The story implies the government passed moral judgement on Dani for getting pregnant out of wedlock. We wait with bated breath for Theo to realize the possibility the child could be his, a wait that becomes frustratingly long, because he only knows exactly as much as the story requires him to know. He isn’t so much thick as gormless.

That, sadly, becomes this novel’s persistent description. North creates an interesting universe in which libertarian attitudes have led to a for-profit government, a reading that is, in British terms, half Tory, half UKIP. But she anchors our ability to see that universe on a character so shapeless and inert, so completely passive, that the whole story quickly becomes a cipher. We’re hostage to a viewpoint character with no viewpoint.

North’s chapters featuring Neila sadly underline this. While Theo lies recovering on her houseboat, delusional when he isn’t asleep, she wanders London’s parks, taking in the natural world that’s becoming increasingly rare because it isn’t profitable. These chapters serve North’s theme, but to a disproportionate degree, little or nothing happens during these chapters. I started skimming, waiting for the story to resume in earnest.

Which, sadly, it too infrequently does. I fear sounding like some semi-literate Philistine saying this, wishing life was more like the movies, but in a society where people are often pressed for time, and reading is a luxury not everyone can equally afford, authors can’t negligently waste readers’ time by filling chapters with talky exposition and inert thematic content. Not for nothing do most bestsellers have chapters under ten pages long.

Perhaps the most telling thing I can say about this novel is: at some point, I realized I’d set the book down, and hadn’t picked it up for nearly a month. In fairness, I feel bad about that. North has created an interesting setting that I wanted to like. But she’s given little pressing reason to keep reading.