This author has produced 2 novels. About 10% of the way into reading this one, his second, I purchased the first one, The Autodidacts.
The cover of the 1st novel intrigues me. The cover of this one puzzles me. I imagine it is a riff on synapses within the brain. Pieces of it resemble neurons. One can also compare it to a map. One perceives weather, a landscape. It communicates a sense of space. The cover thus intimates certain trends we will notice while reading.
This is by no means a typical novel. The author’s method is at once subtle and direct. His satire is scathing, a very strong component of the whole. I appreciate the many keen observations related to contemporary ills. It covers the gamut of modern fears: environmental collapse, AI takeover, dehumanization, disturbing trends in the media and many more. They are woven into the story, though at times heavy, because the characters seem hyperaware of the problems at hand. Though this makes sense in the realm of reportage they are engaged in.
The atmosphere accumulates oppressively, of a world gone shoddy with an addiction to technology. Its truth is blaring. How often do we see people clutching their phones today in public and private, in toilet stalls, in line, at the gym while pretending to work out, eyes glued to the screen? These devices might as well be implanted. In the author’s fictional version of reality, that’s just step one. Add to that creative cloning, designer drugs, and every conceivable mechanization of the human sensorium.
Right away I was intrigued, then I was swept away by the unpredictable plot veerings, which scuttled without warning into countless departments of discourse. The scenes are effective, elaborate, with a good mix of dialogue and description. Some may find the shifts in perspective confusing. I thought the choices embodied an experimental sensibility in keeping with the wake-up-pay-attention intention of the author. Be prepared for second person narration and embedded dream-within-a-dream-type scenarios.
Lakerman though, our protagonist, seems easily roped into the distractions he’s supposed to write about for his journalism gig. His resistance is paltry. But what better way to gain firsthand experience for the benefit of the reader? We needed him to be utterly lost in this grievous and undignified way. While it is easy to show villainous corporations harvesting human capital to enrich the top echelon, the real enemy in this tale is human nature, and how susceptible we are to manufactured realities. We envision our alternate selves constantly in the natural hardware we use to process the environment, and anyone who likes the smell of money is quick to give us access to perceived advantageous modifications thereto.
I fear people may live so much in these virtual non-realities that the true world will vanish before our eyes, into a loop of whirling nonsense. Therein waits madness.
Kendall’s prose style is well-suited to disorienting forays into pre-apocalyptic yearnings.
The submission of humans to AI systems is already in progress seemingly. Corporate productions overtake daily life, minimizing human choice, producing lifestyle zombification. We need not even mention the role of corrupt journalism, rampant environmentalism, trippy barely tested drugs flowing into the market. It is our duty to question authority, but if we don’t question our sense perceptions in the first place, where will we be?
In the mode of Philip K. Dick, Kendall takes the reader on a descent into horror shows of Capitalist greed, political unrest, and psychological instability. I had the heaving heebie-jeebies while reading this. It is a discomforting analysis of late-stage anthropocene anxieties. Inevitably, it uses the integration of technology with the human body and consciousness as a tool to depict the subliminal agendas, ad-speak, and illogical life choices within as a sort of antiestablishment attitude richly glossing a saddening story of one person’s eerie plummet into nonentity – all while not sacrificing one ounce of wit, literary merit or ambiguity.
An impressive display of writing, subtext, and possible interpretations. Highly recommended.
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