Version Control by Dexter Palmer
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Ennui

Millennial musings about life, love and the point of the universe. Lots of characters, lots of issues. Endless soul searching, tech referencing, white-girl conversing, couples coupling and uncoupling while a vaguely threatening new political order operates in the background.

At several points I thought I grasped a possible central theme emerging from the set-piece conversations. The presumptuousness of scientific method, the adverse social effects of infotech, the perennial haplessness of the young, the relevance (or lack of it) of philosophical inquiry (particularly about time travel) and modern practises of grief popped up as candidates, only to see them diluted in the rising sea of topics, concerns, arguments, and existential angst.

Do people really talk like this? “But most people don’t want to—don’t laugh—most people don’t want to change the world, right? They might, you know, go out and vote or something, but for the most part they’re happy to live in the world like it is. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But stupid me—I have ideals.” Not in my generation. It’s all so cute, so twee, so self-centred.

Ultimately I think I found the key in my own experience of reading the book: boredom. These are boring lives engaged in a boring society with only the most boring responses to events. Cheap science, cheap politics and cheap theology drown out the possibility for empathy in the background of human tragedy. Yet another story, therefore, that makes me glad to be past it.

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