All philosophers are trolls. No offense, Jefferson. But that’s really the whole project, isn’t it? Trolling common sense, trolling reality. What if you aren’t real, what if we don’t know what we actually know, what if all this stuff we take for granted can’t be taken for granted, and what if we ignore all the realities we act on in everyday life and instead push our thinking way past all norms and givens of observed behaviour, into this inhuman domain of pure logic, and see what messed-up and counterintuitive conclusions we can draw? I mean, that’s basically an entire discipline based on a fancy form of intellectual trolling. It’s right there at the dawn of the subject. Socrates was the first and worst. Massive, obscene troll. What if good isn’t good, what if justice isn’t justice, what if the virtues are really vices, what if nothing is real? Apart from everything else, he’s constantly contradicting himself. The dialogues are really just him trolling his mates and them being polite about it. Socrates, the original and greatest troll. He would have loved the comments section.
I read Reality and Other Stories thinking that this collection of eight short tales of “horror” would be appropriate leading up to Halloween; recognising John Lanchester as a Man Booker-nominated author further upped my interest and expectations. In the end, however, this collection is pretty weak tea: Each story focuses on some element of modern life — as the blurb promises, you can expect haunted cell phones and a demonic selfie stick — and although I did like Lanchester’s character work while setting up each unique situation, every story builds to an expectedly twisty conclusion that would make second-grade Twilight Zone or Black Mirror episodes. This passes the time, but not delightfully. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
I’m not interested in dissecting each of the eight stories but will quote chunks — and it would seem that in “chunks” is how Lanchester writes; I appreciate how long these passages are — to give a sense of the themes in Reality. There’s quite a bit of ironic humour throughout:
He hugged like a natural non-hugger who had taken professional instruction in how to overcome his instincts and hug, and then found, greatly to his own surprise, that he liked it. Which, in fact, was what he was, and the reason I know is that I gave him the course, “I Hate Hugging: Overcoming Your Fear of Intimacy Through Touch”, as a fortieth-birthday present.
And there are several stories that are from the perspective of professors (and a retired schoolteacher) that seem intended to lampoon their aura of intellectual superiority:
The first chair is an Italian macroeconomist of about my age. He spoke some sense about econometrics but then veered off into some whiffle about dialogue and conversation and paradigms. Overall, poor. He was succeeded by a female Eastern European literature professor in early middle age who had hair with a blue streak in it and purple glasses. Also bangles. There ensued a series of platitudes, falsehoods, mischaracterisations, illiteracies — an entire thesaurus of modern nonsense. The ostensible subject of her speech was the continuing contemporary importance of myth, but from the point of view of a properly trained mind — i.e. mine — there was no content at all.
And nearly every story builds to a mildly creepy scene as in the following:
I may have fallen asleep. I’m not sure. What happened next was in the margin between dreams and full consciousness. I knew where I was and what I was doing, but my volition seemed to have been dialled down so that I could not move or speak. I saw the handle of the door, directly across from where I was sitting, start to move. It was easy to tell, because it was an irregular wooden handle and the pattern of light shifted on it as it turned. The door began, very gradually, to open. The figure in the doorway was backlit from the light in the hall, and I couldn’t see its face, but I could see that it was a man. A tall man. Slowly and in complete silence, he came into the middle of the room. He was holding a phone in his right hand, and when he got to the middle of the room he lifted it up to his face. For the first time, I could see his eyes. In the reflected light of the phone, they were completely white. There was no pupil and no iris. I ordered myself to stand, but couldn’t. I felt as if there were nothing left of me but a compound of fear and helplessness.
And then come the twists — none of which jolted me from my seat. What a TV show like Black Mirror does really well is to draw a line between today’s technology and some horrifyingly plausible future use, but that’s not Lanchester’s method: half of these stories give today’s tech (cellphones, audiobooks, that stupid selfie stick) supernatural agency and the other half — more like the Twilight Zone — are set in a slightly different world (with commonplace androids, a Kafkaesque prison cell, a reality show that literally spells out its twist ending) and none of them have enough creep factor, social commentary, or genuine surprise ending to make a satisfying tale of “horror”. Again, this was a fine read, but I'd give it two and a half stars and am rounding down to two. (I wish I had remembered beforehand that I hadn't really liked Lanchester's Booker nod — The Wall — either.)
