Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
The Beautiful Bureaucrat began rather well, but by about
half-way through I was very annoyed by it and finished it in a bit of a strop,
to be honest. I read it because of an
endorsement from Ursula Le Guin, whom I respect greatly, but I rather wish I
hadn't.
The story is weird and dystopian. Josephine and her husband Joseph move to a
nameless city from a nameless "hinterland" and have to live in a
series of squalid, very short-term sub-lets.
She, desperate for employment, takes a job in a sinister place where she
spends all day in a windowless office,
seeing almost no-one other than a couple of sinister, nightmarish characters
and performing repetitive inputs to the sinister
Database. Her alienation and
disorientation grows as the significance of what she is doing gradually dawns
on her and we get into somewhat mystical (or possibly sci-fi) realms.
For a while, this was sufficiently atmospheric and
intriguing to keep me interested, but I began to tire of it after a while. There is a lot of frightfully clever writing,
darling, which is very keen to show us how clever it is, but I thought it was
ultimately pretty facile with some very irritating aspects. For example, Josephine's deteriorating mental
state is portrayed by her continually jumbling words she has just used, like
this: "She didn't know whether pomegranates should be selected based on
firmness or fragrance or hue.
Poor me granite.
Pagan remote.
Page tame no."
There really is an awful lot of this stuff and it soon began
to feel to me less like a picture of a mind in turmoil than a teacher of
Creative Writing indulging herself. (Why
was I not surprised to discover than Helen Phillips teaches Creative Writing?) Later, we get this: "His name a synonym
for file. Correction: his name a synonym
for life." This does have
significance in the story, but there is so much high-octane
"file-life" writing that I began to think "OK, OK – I get it,
but it's just a bit of slightly facile wordplay. No need to go on!" And so on, and so on.
I make no claim to exceptional perceptiveness, but I'm not
wholly dim and I simply can't see what the book was ultimately trying to say -
if anything. One critic says that it's
"a narrative in which the perplexities of work and marriage gradually
change their colours to display the perplexities of birth and death". Well, perhaps. Personally, I thought it was the sort of
self-indulgent book which creates a stir in chattering circles for a while
before being forgotten for a new dinner-party fad.
It would be simple to apply adjectives like Kafka-esque or
Orwellian to this book, but that would lazily imply membership of a league to
which it certainly doesn't belong. I'm
sorry to be so critical, but I didn't like The Beautiful Bureaucrat at all. I have given it a slightly generous two stars
because the opening was at least intriguing and it has the immense merit of
being fairly short, but it really wasn't for me.
(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)
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