There's no warning, no explanation. I can't hear the car from here. I just open my eyes and see the green lights. It's like they appeared out of nowhere, shaking me from my daze. They are brighter than most headlights, glaring from between the two dead trees at the end of the lane. I don't know the precise time, but it's dark. It's late. Too late for a visitor. Not that we get many of them.
Like many readers, I came to Iain Reid's Foe after having found his debut novel, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, so original and unsettling. I didn't know what to expect from the latest read (and I'd encourage future readers to not even scan this book's blurb for fear of spoilers), and after having sat and thought about it for over a day, I still can't even say if I really liked this book. It's commonly said that good books don't make good movies (although I am intrigued by the news that Charlie Kaufman is developing Reid's first novel; that's the kind of creative mind that could definitely pull it off), and I personally believe that if I can imagine a book being perfectly captured in one episode of a TV show (as the plot of Foe easily could in a Twilight Zone or Black Mirror type series), then I don't think of it as very deep or novelistic. Even so, that's just the plot: there's something more subtle happening in Foe, but maybe it's too subtle; I was straining to grasp the point behind this; I didn't even mark any intriguing or representative passages to quote in my review – which doesn't mean that I found the writing bad, it's just all subtext; impossible to excerpt; hard to review. (I don't intend to go over the plot here beyond the opening setup – but even that could be a spoiler for someone who has yet to read Foe.)
Struggling to understand what, if anything, was the point of Foe, I was pleased to find an interview with the author in which he explains his inspiration:
I was out at an awards ceremony and there was a man who was receiving a prize and the way he thanked his wife from the stage was very disturbing, at least to me. Everyone else was really happy with it, and they thought it was this great acceptance speech; they were almost sighing out loud at how it was. He said things like “I want to thank my wife for putting up with my instability, and allowing me to do what I do.” I thought, “No, I’m sure she has her own thing, her own life, she’s not there to prop your genius up.” It seemed so icky to me, as did the idea that this dynamic was something he was being accepted or even congratulated for. So that’s when that idea I mentioned before about confinement within a relationship came to me. I wanted to write about a relationship that wasn’t ruined by one dramatic moment, like somebody cheating or losing their temper or a secret, but instead had been slowly rotting over time. Once you’re in a situation and you’re committed to it, what else can happen? How can you get out? That’s where things started.
So, with that in mind, the setup of Foe: Sitting in his remote farmhouse one evening, Junior is half-asleep, letting his beer grow warm, when a black sedan with strange green lights comes rolling up his driveway. He calls his wife, Hen, to come downstairs as he opens the door to the visitor: A young man named Terrance who represents a government-linked tech firm – OuterMore – who has big news for the couple. Apparently, based on overheard conversations through their “screens” (“not surveillance or active listening”, just an algorithm that “recognizes words of interest”), Junior has been long-listed in a lottery to be one of the first people sent to an orbiting space station called “The Installation”. We quickly realise that we're in a near future (OuterMore started as an autonomous car company six decades earlier, the climate has gotten much hotter, the farmhouse is surrounded by intensive Big Ag monoculture), and it's unclear whether Junior and Hen's basic acceptance of the situation (Junior points out that he never asked for this honour, but he's not exactly freaking out) is characteristic of their own personalities, or if in this future world it becomes pointless to argue with government-linked agents who roll up your driveway late in the evening. Junior and Hen ask very few questions of Terrance, and as he leaves them with the assurance that it will be a couple of years before they hear from him again, they resume their lives.
It isn't hard to predict where the plot goes in this, but like I said, it's pretty obvious that this book isn't really about the plot. Yet, as an examination of a relationship, I really didn't think that these haltingly noncommunicative conversations between Junior and Hen (in which Junior thinks everything is okay and an impatient Hen wants him to know that things haven't been okay for a long time, but circumstances now have her trapped here with him) went far enough – it was all strange and off-kilter, I appreciated the mood throughout, but I couldn't quite grasp the emotions of the characters. I understand that we're getting this story from Junior's perspective – and like the author at the awards ceremony that Reid references in the interview above, he's oblivious to the agency of his wife beyond her role in supporting his own narrative – but if Henrietta honestly never wanted to play the untunable piano in the farmhouse cellar, even though Junior handmade her a piano bench and asks her to go down there and play him to sleep, then neither marriage vows nor whatever responsibility she has to OuterMore ought to prevent her from saying no. (And just the fact that Junior calls her Hen made me think of a chicken plinking out a tune on a toy piano, which feels like the most agency-less behaviour imaginable; which feels intentional but uninterpretable.) I feel so wishy-washy about this one, and am rounding up to three stars so I don't have to take any kind of a stand by putting Foe in the dislike camp.
