fiction

perfect tense

Michael Bracewell

Cape, #10

FROM the beginning the Romantics denounced the world of business as a slum to the spirit and a prison to the imagination. The world is too much with us/ Getting and spending we lay waste our powers. Later writers employed Wordsworth's lament to show how we deform and lose ourselves in the soulless ambience of office existence. In his personality split between home and office, Wemmick in Great Expectations exemplifies the pathology of business life - in the first location, loving, gentle, and kind; in the second, selfish, suspicious, unfeeling.

In Melville's Bartleby, responsibility for a murder is attributed to the fact that it takes place in

an office, ''a building entirely unhallowed by humanising domestic associations.''

But Wemmick, at least, had a home where he could regain his humanity. It was left to Kafka to show what happens when the whole of life is bureaucratised, when the whole world becomes an office. At this nightmarish extreme, the office becomes one huge, all-encompassing, labyrinthine institution with its own laws at odds with human concerns. Like a Platonic ideal, the office represents true reality, whereas human life is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusion. People are like file cards, they exist in offices or not at all. The result is depersonalisation and dehumanisation: the office worker is a functionary and nothing else. Initiative, invention, and freedom of action are replaced by routines, procedures, and action plans.

This is the world of Perfect Tense: the office has swallowed life much as the whale swallowed Jonah. An abstract, bureaucratic, fantastic world has somehow got itself accepted as normal, the element in which we live, move and have our being. Apart from a description of a train journey into a city as damned as anything in Dante or Baudelaire or Eliot, and an account of a walk through Selfridges with all the other consumer slaves, the setting is always the office as the narrator meditates upon a fantasy that has been normalised. There is a minimum of incident, a maximum of reflection - it is a philosophic essay in which the action is inside the narrator's mind.

The chief progenitor is Kafka. Image has triumphed to the extent that we no longer even know if there is substance. We learn that ''the office runs on fantasy'' and that ''in the office you are guilty until proven innocent'', and these insights neatly combine the predicaments of the heroes of The Castle and The Trial. There are allusions to Eliot (the crowd flowing over London Bridge, the narrator's remark that he has measured out his life with Optrex). Orwell is conscripted. Office conferences are held in Room 404 and the defeat there of everything human is as dispiriting as it is in Room 101. The narrator recalls Whyte's The Organisation Man: ''the peace of mind offered by organisation remains a surrender,

and no less so for being offered in benevolence.'' It echoes O'Brien's transactions with Winston Smith in the Ministry of Love.

But the narrator is finally a more successful rebel than Winston. Despite seeming to go along with the office as new dispensation, as the baptiser and conferrer of identity - he, too, calls people by such names as Frankie Downstairs, Barry Who Left, Martin From Waste - he is clearly never at ease in this bureaucratic Zion. The story begins with his reminiscence of a 20-year-old adventure in which he tried to ''step off the treadmill'' by phoning in sick and taking a holiday from duty. He continues to think of himself as an outlaw, a criminal, out of step, a superfluous man, desperately trying to cling to ''the private self - the unknown self - which armours your dignity and maintains your independence''. His is a quiet mutiny - the only resistance is not to collaborate - but underneath the docile exterior is an anguish as real as Bunyan's pilgrim's, an appeal as frantic as Paul's: who will

deliver me from the body of this death?

The text unpredictably ends with this deliverance. When he says that people like him just can't make a success of office life, the ostensible failure is really a triumph, for if the office is death, to be rejected by it is life. The climactic public dressing-down by his boss leads to ''the most delicious experience of inner peace'' (a real peace in contrast to the shameful content procured by abject surrender to organisation, to Them). The narrator realises that the route to enlightenment only opens up after you have been humiliated in front of the tribe. You have to be cast down before you can be exalted, have to lose the world to find the self. The concluding epiphany gives the lie to the narrator's earlier, bitterly satirical aside that we live in an increasingly secular society.

When he senses behind all of the individual instances of love and kindness he has ever known some far greater and unconditional love; when he intuits ''a light which promised love, and which, knowing all the things which you know about yourself, would still love you, forever'', it sounds indistinguishable from

a believer's understanding of God. His final salvific memory of himself as a child on a lonely beach, discovering pebbles which seem to him like the skulls of aliens, to be laid very gently to rest, explicitly links alienation and salvation for the first time. His earlier fears of having an alien on board (meaning madness or cancer) are totally discredited. We are our own aliens, have lost our true selves in a bureaucratic usurpation. It is so-called normal life that is killing us, the office that is iatrogenic. The tranquil conclusion, with its reverential funereal rites, endorses the dropout's insight, an insight that has the whole weight of the book behind it. It is a book that no-one living in Blair's Britain should miss.

Patrick Reilly