Helen Phillips

“Chilling . . . the perfect summer page-turner.” —Chicago Tribune “Kafka would love The Beautiful Bureaucrat. . . . It’s a surprising revelation of a book from an uncompromising author as unique as she is talented.” —NPR “Riveting . . . thrillerlike . . . Ultimately, The Beautiful Bureaucrat succeeds because it isn’t afraid to ask the deepest questions.” —The New York Times Book Review In a windowless building in a remote part of town, a newly employed young woman, Josephine, inputs an endless string of numbers into something known only as The Database. As the days inch by and the files stack up, Josephine feels increasingly anxious in her surroundings—the office’s scarred pinkish walls take on a living quality, the drone of keyboards echoes eerily down the long halls. When one evening her husband Joseph disappears and then returns, offering no explanation as to his whereabouts, her creeping unease shifts decidedly to dread, in Helen Phillips's The Beautiful Bureaucrat.

A Novel

The Beautiful Bureaucrat

Als bij een vrouw, die bij een geheimzinnige instantie gegevens in een database invoert, zaken gaan opvallen bij de namen in de dossiers, beseft ze de beklemmende waarheid achter haar werk.

Moray Lyle McIntosh

Most people will be able to relate to the themes of Helen Phillips's thriller-like existential drama which hinges, as the title suggests, on the debilitating, and dangerous, aspects of bureaucracy. Josephine, long unemployed and wearied by unemployment is interviewed at a faceless company by a faceless interviewer (known only as the Person With Bad Breath) for a dull, data-entry job that is never fully explained and which she encouraged not to question. In her grimy, featureless office, surrounded by locked doors, floors she cannot access and a mostly hidden workforce it is clear that whatever her job is it must contribute to some lurking horror. We know this because we easily recognise the genre. 

Phillips's satire of recognisably dull lives and the attempt (and in this case, failure) to offset unfulfilling jobs with meaningful home-lives effectively sets up an atmosphere of uncertainty and trepidation by emphasising the isolating tenancies of bureaucracy - the anonymity, the monotony, the ignorance of how a simple task fits into the bigger picture. There is the sense of being trapped. Josephine's featureless office, her limited contact with colleagues, the homogeneity of the few people she encounters - the nightmare of the faceless world - in contrast to the run-down sublets she is forced to occupy with her husband. Places where they struggle to stamp their own personalities over the eccentricities (and squalor) of previous tenants. It draws on classic tales of individual pawns playing unwittingly into large situations they do not understand and the fear of anonymous institutions with extensive and invasive control of individuals.

The influence of Orwell and Kafka is very clear but while their features as classics of the genre are also present here there is little of novelty added in The Beautiful Bureaucrat and it lacks their sustained, deepening menace. The characters have little nuance and are wholly defined by predictable characteristics. In many cases this is certainly deliberate, the Person With Bad Breath is a classic drone; nameless, sexless, with no distinguishing features except a tendency to halitosis, totally dehumanised and defined by his/her role in the company. However this lack of depth also extends to the rest of the cast, despite attempts to dress them up - Trishiffany's ridiculous name, her colourful outfits and brash personality and the overabundance of perky adjectives used to describe her. Even Josephine and Joseph, while they exhibit more personality than the others, do not feel fully developed and lack any real psychological depth. Perhaps this is the point and Phillips's message is that, whatever we believe and however we protest, underneath we are all really as faceless as the Person With Bad Breath or have the potential to become so. 

Unfortunately, this lack of depth is a weakness which extends to her unsettling but underdeveloped world. The tension set up in the initial encounters between Josephine and her new situation drains away even as the action itself. The characters' actions and motivations are predictable, they never do anything unexpected and in the end the "big reveal", the answer to what the work of Phillips's every-couple really is, isn't particularly surprising or particularly original. Perhaps the abundance of such tales have simply made us too adept at joining the dots and guessing the conspiracy but the failure to subvert the best-known tropes of the genre creates an oddly impotent tale.

Becoming increasingly uneasy about suspicious activities at a new job she felt lucky to land, Josephine makes a terrible realization and is forced to confront dangerous and powerful elements in order to protect her loved ones.

Leafling

Once I started reading this book, there was no way for me to stop. My reading experience was essentially this: an inability to move from my bed, an inability to stop reading hilarious lines to whoever was so lucky to be near me at the time, and, once I was alone, a lot of me giggling and/or gasping to myself. It was a great time.

From how I've described this so far, it sounds like I was reading a comedic novel. But this was easily one of the creepiest books I've ever read. The surreal take on a bureaucratic office includes a man with no face, grimy hand prints all over a claustrophobic office wall, doppelgangers, and strange strings of words leaking into the main character's mind. The thing is, Phillips' writing is just so clever. Every dose of creepy is coupled with a bit of "spot on." I couldn't help but laugh at Josephine's darkly comic thoughts about work, life, and relationships throughout.

 "Josephine had yet to receive any instructions about what name or title she ought to use for her boss; her failure to ask now meant that she never would."


If you like a strange, thrilling read that feels like a puzzle and plays with language, this is the book for you. I was horrified, I was uncomfortable, and I was delighted. You may not have ANY idea what's going on most of the time as the tension continues to mount, but the pay off at the end is clean and well thought out.
Helen Phillips, be my best friend. 

Full review: http://outlandishlit.blogspot.com/201...

The Beautiful Bureaucrat A Novel

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