The Circle by Dave Eggers

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Circle is a very darkly comic masterpiece, hilarious in places but ultimately harrowing. It depicts, all too plausibly, a 21st-century hell of our own making: a consensual liberal totalitarianism all the more sinister for being so relentlessly benevolent.

The Circle is a ravenously ambitious fictional Silicon Valley tech company that seems to be Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon all rolled into one. It is the Big Brother of a near-future world of Dave Eggers's imagination, but its encroachments on the privacy and dignity of its billions of users and tens of thousands of employees are really only one or two jumps ahead of the world that we actually (or virtually) live in now. That's what makes the novel both so funny and so appalling.

The Winston Smith character is Mae, a young woman previously wasting away after college in a crummy job at the local utility back in her hometown near Fresno, who can't believe her good fortune when she lands a job at the Circle. She inevitably and implacably gets sucked into the company's corporate culture, which is to say its glib ideology and mission of mind control. Anyone who has worked inside, say, Microsoft Corporation - as I once did for an instructive six months - knows what that is like.

Mae's ex-boyfriend, Mercer, is the voice of reason: "You comment on things, and that substitutes for doing them. ... Under the guise of having every voice heard, you create mob rule, a filterless society where secrets are crimes." The Circle proves the prescience of George Orwell's prediction that "it" would become subtler with the passage of time. Nineteen Eighty-four depicts a directly political form of totalitarianism, because that is what Orwell was in a position to imagine. The Circle is the novel that Orwell would have written if he were alive today.



View all my reviews