- QualityLand, by Marc-Uwe Kling. Hachette. $22.99.
A dystopia is an exaggeration of its present. It samples the features of its contemporary world and slides them up to a natural extremity, before placing them back down and wandering around in them. In doing so it hopes to reveal in greater clarity the problems at the heart of those issues which inspire it, and perhaps a clearer course away from this future.
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QualityLand is the dystopia built of today - the horizon of our brave new digitised world.
Springing from the mind of renowned German satirist, Marc-Uwe Kling, and translated into English by Jamie Lee Searle, QualityLand presents the world of a future not too distant, and a country not unlike our own, in which the automation of consumerism, supercharged by the internet age, has rolled on and crashed back into itself.
The novel controversies of today have long since drifted by unresolved and become whole pillars of society. Kling's world features a panopticon-like social credit system, untempered AI networks set to work advertising and socially manipulating, entrenching each individual's echo chamber. Here we find a world where the problem of political apathy and low voter turnout is solved first by withholding polling numbers, and next, the election result altogether.
This book explores how the consumerist ideologies of the modern world, which are heralded as propagating individualism and economic egalitarianism can, by those exact same processes, turn on themselves and destroy the substance of those virtues.
QualityLand follows Kling's skit-like satiric style. Three distinct but intertwined stories of three characters, Peter Jobless, John of Us, and Martyn Chairman, are interspaced with advertisements and news articles from this evolving world, complete with internet comments from random nobodies.
Peter is a man with a pitiably low social credit score - deemed a 'useless' of society - who, in his own half-resigned way, bucks the system that commercialises his life. One day, he finds a real reason to fight when, as per usual, the algorithms buy him what he wants (before he knows he wants it) - only it's an absurd sex toy, and he definitely doesn't want it!
John meanwhile is an android in the race to be the next president of QualityLand - the first of his kind to do so. He believes he has all the answers, having access to all the information, and sometimes it seems he really does, although his manoeuvres in the world of politics leave those around him frequently wondering if he is as capable as he believes. It is never exactly clear how many moves ahead - or behind - this black box politician really is.
Martyn is a more minor character- a simple politician following the path in front of him fairly indifferently. His mediocrity and inflated masculinity represents one side of humanity which John must account for.
Kling's style is irreverent, cynical, often crude, and unendingly funny. Every instant of this book roasts the ironies of some modern issue or another, building a world where policemen are paid on commission, and relationships are automatically made and broken by algorithmic matching. A satire like this inevitably walks the line between gut-punching, understated irony, and too-clever-by-half self-congratulations. I am happy to say that this book roundly stays on the right side of this border.
Moreover, this book does not shy away from the philosophy that informs it. It frequently appeals to the echo of devices seen in classic European philosophical literature, using such icons to dive into science fiction, philosophy, and the modern economic ideologies.
However, not all of the promise of QualityLand is realised. Like a microcosm for the book as a whole, its most interesting plot thread spluttered at its end. Where Peter's story is of the individual fighting a system gone mad, John's story grappled with saving this system. I expected some revelation from John. He was uniquely placed - built within that system, and yet a master of that system - to use it to save itself. John presented a view of the modern world, liberal democracy, commercial individualism, consumerism, etc, as powerful, wonderful tools in the unsupervised hands of incompetent, masculine ninnies. He hinted at the possibility of using its flexibility to overcome a seemingly inevitable fall to the lowest common denominator, and to show that the benefits of those systems are real and salvageable. Or, perhaps that they were not. The promise of this exploration, and the mystery of John, the personification of the intelligent system above and alongside the human, was tantalising; but not fulfilled.
In these instances of critical vigour, the satirical dystopia appears more satire than dystopia. More a caricature of the world, than a conceptual discussion. But this criticism should not distract from the great, riotous success that this book nonetheless is.