Office "Life"
Perfect Tense by Michael Bracewell
Jonathan Cape, 176 pages
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
Like all caged creatures, something happens to people who work in offices. Zoo animals attack each other or anyone who gets too close to the cage. They're also depressed and on Prozac. High school is rife with paranoia, persecution and bullying. A kid will come to school with a knife or a gun; many others have fantasized about it. The office climate manages to combine the depression and blind combativeness of the zoo and paranoid insecurity and aggression of high school. And they buy a cake or a card when it's someone's birthday.
The person who works in a busy bar or restaurant is dealing with customers all day, including the demanding/rude and the drunk. It's an all-day three-way wrestle between the customers, the co-workers and the manager. Usually the coworkers understand and are comrades that you can make jokes about the other two factions. Usually the coworkers are all zipping in and out of the place, back to school, another job, or another activity they are more interested in. The customers are idiots and it's just a job. The world of the office is sheltered, for the most part, from the public, but instead of celebrating this fact the madness and antagonism is produced from within. People aren't rushing off elsewhere in the short or long term. They're there to stay. Whether this is known consciously or subconsciously, the effect is a suffocating depression, acted out in never-ending pettiness. They see themselves as having careers. The days are mind-numbingly repetitive and boring. Conversation is gossip, or something about clothes or food or pretending they did something on the weekend. There is a myth that earwigs enter people's ears when they are sleeping and eat their brains. The earwig doesn't really do this, but it can and does happen with people in an office. One day an entire office of 142 people can crawl inside your ear and slowly, but completely, chew away your entire brain.
Michael Bracewell's Present Tense is an amusing and perceptive little novel about the small, confining world of the office. The narrator (also the main character) is not angry or rebellious. He is quiet, anonymous: "You might be wondering who I am, or what I look like. It doesn't matter. You wouldn't look twice if you saw me on the train. I look just like everyone else." Though he is a quiet person he is not a completely compliant drone; he is detached, and it is detachment, expressed in his humour and observation that makes him a sympathetic character.
The novel is set in London, and though there is plenty of description particular to London (Selfridges, Victoria Station, the workers streaming into the City, the sandwich bars), there is enough queasy office detail that will resonate with anyone who has ever worked in an office anywhere. There's the brown inter-office envelope going around collecting money for coworkers with not that much money in it, the herding into the conference room for a boring meeting, the office affair, the desk drawers with "manuals that had barely been consulted, notebooks with nothing in them." And the people: the sighing one that changes her shoes to flip-flops, the sound of which makes "the time pass more slowly," the younger employees who don't talk to him, the older ones that have been there too long, the person laughing in a "forced, heartily way" as if the boss was the "greatest deliver of wisecracks who ever lived."
But it isn't all a joke, it's sad, too, lives not being lived. The flashes of people gasping for life, gasping, and not making it. His old friend Paul, who he watched "disappear beneath the surface of the crowd in that pub in Holborn." And the narrator, feeling self-loathing or feeling nothing, having flashes of panic about it all, and wondering if "this is what it felt like to be extremely old." Present Tense makes us laugh with recognition at the crumpled paper caught in the desk drawer while recoiling in horror at the crumpled lives caught in wasting office drudgery.