Perfect Tense - Hardcover

Bracewell, Michael

3.48

50 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224044516 ISBN 13: 9780224044516

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2001

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The anonymous, middle-aged narrator of Perfect Tense is a man broken on the wheel of office life - the great beige wheel of grinding routine, the uniform grey carpets, the endless buff envelopes. Driven by the entropy of the office, out of step with the zeitgeist, he has begun to question his whole generation, and his own empty, under-achieved life in particular. Recounting his day at the office - one particular day, which seems to mimic the coffee-mug slogan, 'Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life' - the narrator scrutinises the arcana of his environment like an urban anthropologist, looking for aesthetic or spiritual purpose and finding only print-outs and suspension files, spider plants and yuccas and polystyrene cups.In this short, brilliant novel, we are taken on a terrifyingly familiar tour of office life which is at once hilarious and profound - the comedy of recognition matched by deepening urban anxiety, as if T.S. Eliot had been blessed with Groucho Marx's comic timing. One man's unravelling philosophical crisis amid the leaving parties and sandwiches becomes, in the hands of Michael Bracewell, a metaphysical search for order and purpose deep in the back of a desk drawer.

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Review:

"Work is a blessing", says the anonymous narrator of Michael Bracewell's third novel Perfect Tense, although it's hard to see why. Crammed into commuter trains, shackled to a world of plexi-glass office prints and Ladderex shelving units, Bracewell's character is a man perpetually in the career hinterland. He spends his days--and specifically the day over which the novel's action takes place--in a reverie of shame and regret, a self-styled urban anthropologist, wandering the city in his lunch hour, trying to account for the manifold perversities of the working life. What are glamorous Kate and Simon Grinch up to on the roof of the building? Whatever became of Fat Val or Les's legendary ties, and why do so many young people phrase every sentence as a question?

Readers expecting a rollicking read might be surprised by the lack of narrative in this novel, because--as in real office life--precious little happens. But shining like jewels amid the grey carpeting and the inspirational coffee-mug slogans, are Bracewell's observations. Sharp, poignant and funny, this novel lends a wholly fresh perspective to an almost universal experience. The Marks and Spencer sandwich queue, the bleak Fitzrovia pubs where office romances begin and end, the horrors of the leaving-do are all treated to Bracewell's acerbic analysis, rendered almost, but never quite meaningful. Anyone in danger of taking work seriously needs to read this book straightaway. But don't let the boss catch you. --Matthew Baylis

Review:

"The alienation of the modern wage-slave has seldom been described so precisely, eloquently and entertainingly." -- David Lodge

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