Shannon 's Reviews > Circle

The Circle is a perfectly timed book and will be timely for quite some time, ha ha. The question of our right to privacy has long been debated and is not altogether a given - even less so since 9-11. The right to privacy has taken on a new dimension since the world wide web took off and social media became 'the thing'. While social media can be empowering and has been used to a means to redress a power imbalance (think of those who film police beating someone up, or the Arab Spring), it can also have the reverse effect. Pair this up with the amazing power of the internet - or rather, specific software programs and companies - to track our usage, our spending, our habits etc. in order to 'better' or more 'efficiently' target us with 'tailored' products, and it can seem like the whole world is watching you. (There is the interesting case, in the United States, of the teenage girl who started receiving advertising for baby products; her father, outraged, complained, but it turns out she was pregnant and didn't even know it - but the companies did. They knew she was pregnant before she did because of the things she was buying, which apparently, women who are pregnant tend to buy. Such is the vast volume of data at their disposal that their algorithms are able to work that kind of thing out.)

When Mae Holland gets a job at The Circle (modelled on Google), she feels giddy and in awe. Sure, it's in a call centre division, answering customer service emails, but in a company like the Circle, people notice when you prove yourself, and Mae is determined to prove herself. At first, though, it seems that her values and ideals are at odds with the Circle's: they want total transparency in people's lives, while she still goes out in a kayak for peace and solitude and, horror of all horrors, doesn't post about it on social media. Mae mends her ways and becomes a staunch supporter of everything the Circle does and says. But in a company that has eyes and ears everywhere, who is the strange, enigmatic man who slips in and about, undetected? The name he told her doesn't show in the system, and Mae soon doubts that he works there at all, but it's not long before she realises that he may be planning something. So when he asks for her help, Mae is faced with a momentous decision.

As someone who is not on her mobile phone constantly, or who uses her social media accounts with any frequency (I visit maybe once a week, and post even less), and as a teacher who is constantly in competition with the distraction of mobile phones (or rather, their internet connectivity) at a period in our civilisation in which the boundaries between work/study and social time seem ever more blurred by users, I found the Circle and its creed disturbing, even frightening, but all too real. The Circle represents the kind of oppression - through the denial of a right to privacy - that the people not only buy into, but enforce. In effect, people police themselves, a kind of brainwashing. It all comes down to the power of language, and the power of public relations (the other name for PR is 'propaganda').

Mae is something of a frustrating heroine because she's not very bright. She's easily impressed, and other people's arguments - in particular, the people who run the Circle - completely blindside her. Mae represents the vast blob of humanity in this: she is the everyman, a simple, ordinary person with modest ambitions and modest intelligence. It doesn't make for easy reading, in the sense that she makes you, the reader, feel more superior - and I'm not someone who is all that keen on feeling that way.

In true literary dystopian fashion, this has an ending that you probably won't like, but it is the right ending for the story. While the understanding of dystopian fiction, as a genre, has been skewed by the slew of Young Adult adventure novels - in which the dystopia serves as setting and premise, but which aren't, really, dystopian stories in and of themselves (more like coming-of-age stories for young teens with a message of hope and freedom through collaboration, resilience, perseverance and rebellion against an oppressive regime) - really, the dystopian genre is concerned with a satiric representation of authority and socio-political commentary. They're not meant to be thrillers or romances or coming of age stories or exciting adventures. They're meant to be dark, troubling thought experiments that emphasise flaws in our political structure, social values and to show us where we might end up should we follow a certain path. Here, Eggers has taken on Google's vast reach, the influence of social media and the troubling infringements on privacy through laws that are passed with little fanfare, all in the name of protecting us and freedom - an irony that is best served through the satirical nature of dystopic work - and his ending is apt. As such, I value this novel for its ideas and the disturbingly realistic depiction of twenty-first century westerners, even though it is at times slow and Mae herself is rather too realistic for comfort. But that's the point, surely: you shouldn't get too comfortable, reading a dystopian novel.

Read in September 2016.