Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2016 March 23 • Wednesday

The movie Seconds is good enough that I thought I'd read David Ely's original novel.

Okay, so for this mass-market paperback edition, the designers were told to make it look like The Matrix. This is a pretty horrible cover.

Book and movie have the same story. Rich men past their prime can have a second chance at life. An unnamed organization will, for a hefty fee, arrange for each client a fake death and a rebirth, following rigorous surgery and training, as a younger man with a chance to live whatever dreams had been left by the wayside.

The main character is named Antiochus Wilson, but that's his new name. The reader never learns either his real, original name, or the name of the "company" that provides this service, one of several touches that give Seconds a genuine claim to being Kafkaesque, a quality that's oversubscribed but quite apt in this case.

In addition to being a story of paranoia and dread and a disorientingly quotidian surreality, Seconds is also a bleak satire, a Nineteen Eighty-Four for mid-century, white-collar America.

Ely writes with wit and precision and combines remorseless inevitability with a light touch and dispassionate perspective. He reveals the pathos of the situations and the characters with small details and deft understatement.

One company employee is named Davolo, for instance, an "I" removed from Diavolo. (The devil's in the details.) Another one has a PhD in history. His subject was the fall of Rome. When Wilson, in crisis, grabs hold of a statuette of the crucifixion for support, the company's catch-all religion man admonishes him to let go of it: it's plastic and "might easily be cracked".

Wilson turns out to be a dud in his new life as young handsome freewheeling bohemian. His success in American conformist/capitalist society has emptied him of his personhood. He thinks he wants more than his job at the bank and his house in the suburbs and he wants to want more than that—who wouldn't?—but he never really did and he doesn't now.

One poignant moment has him sitting in an airport bar, regretting his new life and missing his old one, and looking into the mirror behind the bar to see that "The mirror's image of an illuminated clock on the opposite wall showed the hands reversed, with time retreating".

Soon every mirror is filled with Antiochus Wilson, the false, young man that Wilson is not and cannot be. He becomes further dissociated from "himself," unable to become this new person or return to the old one.

This kind of identity crisis seemed to have been especially relevant in the 1960s: Eyes Without a Face and Face of Another come to mind.

The kicker is that the company has grown into a corporate monster out of control, gobbling up human souls at a frightening rate with an even more terrifying number of failures like Wilson. It's a diabolical machine but it's ability to suck in wealth suggests nothing other than continuous growth. And its plans for future expansion are chilling. The parallels with actual corporate activities are obvious and Ely doesn't waste our time pointing them out.

The last line is a masterstroke of horror, a soulless and apathetic update of Winston Smith's loving Big Brother. The first line is "It was noon".