Cubed by Nikil Saval

Published by Doubleday on April 22, 2014

I did not know that more than half of working Americans work in a cubicle (or even that more than half work in offices) but since they tend to be hidden from the public, I suppose I'm just not aware of their pervasive existence. I have no trouble believing that 93 percent of those workers dislike their cubes. The cube world has been lampooned in Office Space, The Office, and Dilbert, among other sources of comedic fiction, but Cubed takes a more serious approach to understanding the world of cubes and the workers who inhabit them. Nikil Saval's wide-ranging discussion is largely a history office workers and their changing environment. Saval explains that he wants to tell that story from the perspective of office workers, but that's the book's least successful ambition.

Cubed discusses the history of clerical workers from nineteenth century counting-houses to their role in modern American life. Some early clerks (like Alexander Hamilton and Ben Franklin) rose above their stations while most (as is true today) toiled in obscurity. In the nineteenth century, clerks in literature received little respect (Bartleby and Uriah Heep are notorious examples) while clerks in the real world were mocked for their aristocratic pretensions by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe and Walt Whitman. But growing membership in "the clerking class" arguably gave birth America's middle class. At that point they were mocked (by Emerson, among others) not for pretension but for whininess, a convention that continues in modern satire.

The urbanization of America gave birth to the large office buildings that form the environment Cubed explores. Clerks were lined up in rows to mimic the factory floor until an anal-retentive mechanical engineer named "Speedy" Taylor made efficiency in the factory and in the office a managerial obsession. Cubed gives detailed attention to Taylor, to Frank Lloyd Wright's contribution to modern office design, to skyscrapers, to the growing role of women as clerical workers after the Civil War (with the concomitant fear that they would seduce their unwary bosses in order to secure raises and special workplace privileges), to the impact of labor unions on office work, and to the evolving way in which political movements and political theorists viewed office workers. He also covers the psychology (and pop-psychology) of office workers, the competition between humans and machines, the language of white collar business (complete with sports metaphors), competing styles of office management (from rigid hierarchies to Zen-like naturalism), potted plants as status symbols, and office sex, little of which takes places inside cubicles.

Cubed also offers an introductory course in the theory of office design, illustrated with pictures of office buildings and their interiors. Work spaces themselves become the focus of the last third of the book, including the "action office" (i.e., an easily disassembled cube). As one critic noted, it is a design that works well for office zombies, the working dead who are crammed into small, disposable spaces. Perhaps deliberately, the spaces create no sense of permanence. Still, the Action Office caught fire and spread across America, with managers taking little notice that nearly all the workers hated their cubes, particularly after they started getting smaller ... and smaller ... and smaller. Attempts to reinvent cubes have largely been futile (unless you count Nerf basketball as a serious workplace improvement). Most experiments to replace cubes have failed although Saval suggests that some (like Google's environment) show promise. He also notes that more employers are recognizing that many skilled employees work better at home, a concept that frustrates the controlling desires of middle managers.

Cubed is well-researched and informative but I'm not sure it is anything more than that. The book told me more than everything I always wanted to know about skyscrapers and the history of office workers, but I'm not sure it gave me much insight into how the world is perceived from the confines of a cube, which is Saval's declared intent. I do like the book's pithy characterization description of "the unholy expectations of the modern workplace, which asked for dedication and commitment, offering none in return." And of course I like all the quotations from Office Space and Sinclair Lewis. Cubed is informative and enjoyable, even if it is a bit scattered and doesn't quite meet its stated goal.

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Syndrome E by Franck Thilliez

First published in France in 2010; published in translation by Penguin Books on April 29, 2014

Ludevic Senechal buys an old film from the son of a man who recently died. The film's former owner was obsessed by espionage and conspiracy stories. As Senechal watches the film, he goes blind. By chance, he speed dials the number of a Lucie Henebelle, a police lieutenant he dated for a short time. When Lucie watches the movie, she almost wishes she had gone blind instead of seeing the gruesome footage. But, as Lucie eventually discovers, there is more to the film than meets the eye ... or the conscious mind.

While Lucie is investigating the movie, Chief Inspector Sharko is lending his assistance as a behavioral analyst to provincial police who are investigating five dead bodies -- their skulls sawed open, hands chopped-off, brains and eyes removed -- that have been found buried in Upper Normandy. Sharko's efforts are hampered by Eugenie, a young woman who blames him for a certain traumatic event in his life. Eugenie is not real but the treatment Sharko is receiving for paranoid schizophrenia hasn't made his tormenter go away. Why Sharko is allowed to carry a gun is a bit of a mystery but perhaps delusions and schizophrenia do not disqualify police officers from carrying lethal weapons in France.

The two mysteries are, of course, linked, and so the two protagonists, Lucie and Sharko, are fated to meet. Their relationship proceeds in a way that is too obvious, but given that this novel is followed by a sequel, perhaps their relationship will take a less predictable path in the next installment.

Soon after they meet, Sharko travels to Cairo to investigate similar murders that occurred 16 years earlier while Lucie's investigation takes her to Canada. Franck Thilliez captures the rhythms of Cairo and Montreal as convincingly as those of his native France. The story relies upon a dark period in the history of Quebec involving the "Dupleissis orphans," a scheme that allowed church-operated orphanages to obtain government funding by falsely certifying orphaned children as mentally ill. Eventually a conspiracy is revealed that, in the tradition of modern thriller conspiracies, is far-fetched but (unlike some modern thrillers) at least remotely plausible. The notion underlying the "syndrome" that gives the book its title is fanciful but not without a scientific foundation.

Once Lucie and Sharko uncover the killer's identity, Lucie is shocked, but I doubt the reader will be. My reaction was "oh," simply because there is no way for the reader to have made the discovery independently. The information dump that ends the story comes as an anti-climax. Despite the disappointing ending, I enjoyed the character of Sharko and will probably read the next novel in the series.

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The Water Rat of Wanchai by Ian Hamilton

First published in Canada in 2011; published by Picador on May 6, 2014

A forensic accountant is an unlikely thriller hero, but Ava Lee is an unlikely forensic accountant. Ava is a Chinese-Canadian who is as adept with martial arts as she is with a calculator. She's more of a debt collector/skip-tracer than she is an accountant. This is, however, a big league version of debt collection.

Ava's current task is the collection of $5 million stolen from a company that financed a seafood supplier. Her travels take her to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Trinidad, Guyana, and the British Virgin Islands. None of the locales gave me the sense of seeing anything that a tourist wouldn't see, but I did get the impression that Ian Hamilton has actually been to those places. A resident's view of the countries is unnecessary as Ava has a tourist's perspective, including an obsessive concern with the amenities available at hotels, as well as their star ratings. Needless to say, Guyana disappoints her. That crime-ridden location nevertheless gives her a chance to show off her formidable fighting skills. At the same time, the story's violence is kept to a necessary minimum. This is more of a cerebral thriller than an action novel, although the action moves at a brisk pace.

Ava is my kind of thriller hero. She's intelligent, resourceful, cunning, a woman of action who thinks before she acts. She gets things done and doesn't monkey around on her way to her goal. Much the same can be said of Hamilton, who writes with certitude, reaching his goal with a minimum of fuss. This is a tightly constructed story that doesn't waste a word. That is a skill that has become increasingly rare among modern thriller writers. The story avoids overreaching and is easy to believe, another rarity in modern thrillers.

In addition to highlighting the corruption that is endemic in less developed countries, Hamilton adds color to the story with Ava's domineering mother and her inscrutable business partner, Mr. Chow. But it is Ava who makes the story work, and she makes it work well. Originally published in Canada in 2011, this is the first novel in the Ava Lee series. It has encouraged me to read the rest of them.

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Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Published by Del Rey on January 28, 2014

Red is the lowest color on Mars, but Red is rising. Darrow is a Red. He was born to sacrifice. Working deep underground to mine the planet's helium, he believes his sacrifices will one day make Mars ready for human habitation. Obedience is noble, or so he has been taught. His wife, Eo, thinks he is a puppet of the Golds, who keep the Reds hungry and obedient. Eo wants Darrow to lead the Reds in revolution but Darrow does not want to die a martyr, as did his father. A traumatic moment changes his mind.

Darrow joins a resistance movement and discovers that there is more to Mars than the underground life he has known. His anger makes him want to take on Octavia au Lune -- who rules the solar system from her base on Earth's moon -- and all the other Golds who have enslaved the underground Reds, but that is a long-term goal. His immediate mission is to infiltrate the Golds, to become one of them so that he can work against them. Once he becomes his enemy, empathy creates an internal conflict that provides the novel with much of its substance.

Red Rising is the sort of novel that is often described as "a rousing adventure." It is actually a little more than that. It delivers action but also intrigue. It moves quickly but it takes time to explore moral conflicts. Its characters are skillfully crafted. It features an impressive amount of world-building based on a future that borrows from Roman mythology (along with, of course, a polite nod in the direction of Edgar Rice Burroughs). This is a science-lite version of science fiction that melds with fantasy without becoming fantasy. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're looking for an explanation of how Mars was terraformed to give it not only a breathable atmosphere but climate control, you won't find it here (apparently it has something to do with helium mining).

My qualms about the story concern my sense that the setup merits something meatier than the war games that dominate so much of the story. The drawn-out war games seems like padding to justify turning a book into a series of books, perhaps with a view to exploiting the mania for war games novels that made it to the big screen, including Ender's Game and Hunger Games. Darrow spends most of the novel trying to prove his mettle to the Golds in order to gain a leadership position. Some of this is interesting (particularly the conflicts within Darrow's "tribe" as members vie to lead the group before battling other tribes) but if the point is for Darrow to do something to free the underground Reds from enslavement, the war games do little to advance the plot. I suspect it will be clear when the trilogy concludes that the story could have been told just as effectively, and more economically, in two books, or maybe just one. The political intrigue that runs through the war games kept me reading but it didn't prevent me from wondering whether the plot would ever stop lurching from one battle to the next and return to the promise of the novel's beginning. I know Pierce Brown will make more money by writing a trilogy (and more power to him), but I would rather have seen the action condensed so that the novel could more rapidly reach a conclusion. Still, although I will unhappily wait for the next book to see if the novel's premise leads to a payoff, I liked the characters and their interpersonal conflicts well enough to recommend Red Rising as "a rousing adventure."

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All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

First published in Great Britain in 2013; published by Pantheon on April 15, 2014

At the start of All the Birds, Singing we know little about Jake Whyte. We know that Jake is a woman of a certain age who speaks with an Australian accent, that she lives alone on a small island in Great Britain, that someone has sliced open and gutted two of her sheep, and that she feels like she's being watched. The novel changes its time frame repeatedly and we soon learn that this is one of three eras in Jake's life that the novel will spotlight. In the second she is part of a sheep shearing team. In the third she is a companion/helper for a creepy sheep farmer named Otto. On the island she tends her own sheep and a strange man named Lloyd drifts into her life. Occasionally we are given glimpses of Jake's difficult childhood but the important event of Jake's formative years is saved for the final chapters.

The story jumps from one stage of Jake's life to another and for much of the novel it is difficult to place the chapters in sequence. At an early point, it is clear that Jake has joined the sheep shearing team to hide from her past, but only later do we learn why she is hiding. The novel's structure forces the reader to engage in mental gymnastics by reordering the chapters to make sense of the story, a technique that helps the reader understand how the components of Jake's life fit together while building suspense. It is clear that at least two stages of Jake's life will end with an eventful climax. The story of one stage works backwards from the climax while the other two move toward it. Again, the novel's unusual and somewhat challenging structure -- it is impossible to understand the story without reading to the end -- contribute to its interest.

The kind of person Jake is, the hard choices she has made (or not made) in her life, are revealed in increments as the story unfolds. The reader has a very different understanding of Jake by the novel's end. Evie Wyld made me feel sympathy for a number of characters who are not particularly sympathetic and a good bit of compassion for Jake, who is not necessarily a bad person but not particularly likable. In the end, it isn't necessary to like Jake to understand the forces that shaped her and to appreciate her pain.

On the other hand, the key formative event in Jake's adolescence, revealed late in the novel, is undeveloped in relation to the details we learn about more recent stages of Jake's life. Her motivation for acting as she does is unconvincing, largely because we know Jake well as an adult but little effort is made to make the reader understand her in her youth. The incident's sketchy presentation at the novel's end deprives it of its power and the reinterpretation of the novel's events that it inspires seems forced. The abrupt and ambiguous and downright strange ending also makes the story feel unfinished. Despite my qualms about the novel's ending, I enjoyed the story's intensity, its air of atmospheric mystery, and its portrait of a damaged human being trying to make the best of a difficult life.

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