The Museum of Things Left Behind by Seni Glaister
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A Comedy of Power

In the line of Gulliver’s Travels, Gormenghast, and The Mouse That Roared, The Museum of Things Left Behind is a send-up of cultural, political and corporate power. Its conceits, its isolation and insulation from reality, its arrogant self-justifications and its inveterate misogyny are displayed with wit and humour. At a personal level the book plays up the particularly masculine disease of the anxiety of influence - the simultaneous devotion to and resentment toward one’s forebears from whom power has been received. Sociologically Glaister shows insight from obvious first-hand experience about how organizations really work, which is generally not how they’re supposed to. They have a momentum of their own which isn’t really subject to anyone’s control.

Glaister’s protagonist, the “Elected Dictator” of the minuscule country of Vallerosa, is, in theory, politically omnipotent. In practice he is the most neurotically constrained person in the kingdom. He can trust none of his ministers; and since the Prime Directive of power is to stay in power, he feels continually oppressed. His father, he feels, had done more. As he says to his chief of staff, “You know, Angelo, I’ve felt for a while now that I’m losing control. I see no tangible signs of it but, from the periphery of my vision, I can tell that, little by little, the things I have within my power are becoming becoming more precarious.”

His vulnerability to his own staff is matched only by his gullibility when confronted with the jargon of American management consultants who know their real job is not to accomplish anything other than to keep him around - in order, of course, that they might stay around. But even their assurances leave him with doubts: “The numbers. Do they add up? If we’re not importing anything, and we’re going to sell everything we’ve got, and all we’ve got now is tea, what are our people actually going to live on?... And, anyway, why do we need more? Whom do we offend if we’re satisfied with enough?” In the battle of common sense vs. the economic imperative, it is always advantage growth. ‘Better’ is the comparative for... well no one is quite sure for what. Success is what passes for success.

The eponymous museum is a Lost & Found of the detritus of the world forgotten randomly over the years in Vallerosa, a sort of national unconscious. But of course each of the residents also carries around his own psychic baggage, which can only be revealed by appropriate external intervention - in this case the arrival of a special guest with royal credentials. Is not her letter of introduction stamped with the image of the British monarch? Thus it is usually through error that one becomes aware of the unconscious. Real progress is always a mistake; we don’t create it, we fall into it.

The Museum of Things Left Behind is witty, well-written, and instructive. It’s a book that all politicians, corporate executives, and economists ought to read. But of course they won’t.

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