The circle

We caught a bus out of the city near dawn
and crossed the wet football fields into the park
after a night of reading and talking and no sleep;
thin psyches, sensitive eyes, amazed by simple things –
oaks and crocuses, birds, breath vapour in the morning air.

February sunlight on the sycamores and chestnuts;
flickering on the spinning edge of a boomerang
bought in a music shop, thrown in a ritual circle.
A dog grabbed it, chewed it up and ran out of sight
over the lip of the hill. The horizon’s circle placed us
at the centre of a world that moved with us like an aura.

We squinted when the sun would break the tree cover
and catch us talking about the four elements and the spirit;
about friends and past lives and drugs and spiced tea;
water spraying from a dog’s wet fur, geese croaking
over the flat lake water, street lights flicking off on the waking roads.

Everything became concentrated in the ritual of the walk –
up the oak and beech slopes to the edge of the golf course,
along the river gully and past the tall, scarred tree,
around the edges of the lake; our conversation
fusing our experiences and memories with this reality:
the alchemy of the elements. Lake, sky, sun, mud, and us.

Once in a while, something notices how scattered we’ve become,
and decides to bring us together again: poetry, pub stories,
sharing sandwiches on a cold bench, kissing under a crumbling wall.
We collect what we can, and offer it to the other for blessing:
an oak twig, shaved and sanded for the altar; the names and shapes
of seeds and leaves; feelings summoned into the material world,
like the perfect oak, alive in space and time until the final storm.

The Circle
By Dave Eggers
Knopf, 2013

The Circle is a novel of near-future dystopian science fiction, although it's primary purpose is as a morality tale, presenting the reader with a social message about the importance of privacy in the computer age.

Mae Holland has just been offered her dream job, a chance to work at The Circle. It's the biggest tech company since... well, ever, bigger than Facebook and Google combined. But almost from the first day it becomes clear that accepting this job also requires accepting a rather pushy corporate culture, one where active use of social media and frequent attendance of company events is required. This isn't too bad... after all, they give her the most up-to-date tablet and phone, and the campus events are pretty cool -- everything from rock concerts to yoga classes to tech lectures.

It isn't long before the extracurricular requirements become not just intrusive, but overwhelming, and Mae finds herself having to give up more and more of her personal life to keep up with her work-related social life. This is overwhelming, but no matter how intrusive work becomes, the benefits are bigger and better. Mae sees more and more of her privacy and her free time slipping away, and can't do anything about it -- to the point that she no longer has a life, and has convinced herself that she doesn't care.

This novel did not impress me. It is somewhat reminiscent of Walden Two, with the author so interested in telling us every detail of the setting -- the company, its magnificent campus, its founders and their ideals -- that it serious diluted the actual story. The writing is wooden, with weak dialog and boring characters, and lots of slice-of-life expository lumps. It does not help that the main character, Mae, is constantly dealing with crippling self-doubt while being constantly overwhelmed by fairly mundane events. Of course, a lot of this is necessary. Mae has to be young and insecure to explain why she goes along with the shaky logic -- and illogic -- of her coworkers. We have to hear about the mundane bits of life so that we can see how completely they are disrupted by The Circle.

In the end, this comes across as a blunt and perhaps overworked morality tale, the moral being that we need to keep a firm grasp on our privacy rights. Unfortunately, in order to make this point the author drains most of the cheer out of the tale, and we are left with a rather dreary and depressing 500 pages of people being sad while surrounded by interesting technology.