Spark by Rupert Dreyfus
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Sarcasm Squared

What do you call sarcasm about sarcasm? Could it be sardony? If so Spark is way up there on the spectrum "irony, sarcasm, satire, sardony.” How far is it possible to send up yourself?

Spark is the self-proclaimed voice of the Y-bother generation. These are the millennial 'snowflakes' who feel betrayed and abandoned by the world but maintain an attitude of romantic love worthy of Byron. Because their metier is sarcasm, they present a real problem to the writer who wants to rub them up a bit.

For example, it is reported recently by the Wall Street Journal that many Y-bothers are jumping ship from Big Finance in London and New York. At first glance they might look a principled lot. But it is cash not ethics that matters. They are dissatisfied with the bonuses which don't allow the life style they expect. How do you get sarcastic in the face of such sarcasm?

The central theme of Spark is the repeated refrain of "our rubbish lives". Included is a manifesto of Y-bothersomness that covers gripes from the demand to participate in the phony (Salinger?) corporate rat-race to the bullshit (Vonnegut?) dictatorship of electricity metres. The disappearance of affordable yuppie city-accommodation sits somewhere in the middle (Lanchester?).

The irony at the low end of the spectrum can get lost in the whinging sardonic frequencies of the upper end. The protagonist is a computer-geek working, but not very hard, in a banking giant. For the moment he's travelling third class on the corporate gravy train. But his prospects? Well he gets offered promotion the first day on the job.

According to social science pundits, this is precisely the guy who has won in the globalisation stakes, the one who has beaten the bloke on the provincial assembly line into a pulp. Wasn't he the one voted against by Brexit and Trump supporters? Yet he too thinks the world is stacked against him. Someone seems to have driven a wedge between folk who have an awfully lot in common.

Y-bothers are hacktivists. That is, they dream about a social system that looks like the internet in which there are no adult responsibilities, no fixed identities, and lots of money in game-playing. They hang out on the internet waiting for the revolution until...well in Spark's case until he gets shot in the gut by the Counterterrorism Unit. From irony to sardony in one narrative jump.

A combination of The Young Ones, The Big Bang Theory, Live Free or Die Hard, and any one of a dozen rom-coms. Amusing but not meant to be taken seriously. When’s the last time you saw a digi-nerd using a Polaroid camera after all? I presume the three or four plot-recaps in what is a shortish book is more than an aid for those readers who might get lost in a toilet stall.

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