vox

I've been meaning to write something about the enjoyable dystopian book club I joined some months ago. It was almost an accident, when I tried to join a regular book club there was a clash of dates so I delved further and found this alternative.

It's been surprisingly good choice, even if some of the books have been a little - er - controversial. There's been some I've really enjoyed and then every so often one comes along that's in another category.

A recent novel, which we discussed in a rammed pub pre-Christmas, is called Vox, by Christina Dalcher. It's a modern book, published in 2018 and after I read it I looked at a few reviews, all of which seemed to be positive.

I'l have to admit that I struggled.

The premise was that women, in some parallel future, were given a bracelet which counted words. After 100 were spoken in a single day the patrician device administered electric shocks of increasing magnitude. Our heroine was able to dodge the predicament by having a social mission Which Only She Could Perform, to Save Someone Important.

I'm not giving away a plot spoiler with that, the book cover does more than enough of that. My copy was downloaded to Kindle and I read it quite quickly. I couldn't get away from the thought that it had been hurriedly constructed and lacked ideas beyond the initial premise.

Thus, I approached the lively pub table where we'd discuss it with some trepidation that I'd missed an important point, or that the book was cutting edge feminist writing that I'd somehow misinterpreted.

But that's the strange thing. I was a bit late for the session, which usually meets at 7pm. Only 20 minutes late but the conversation was already onto other topics. No one had liked the book. Some had read it all (like me) and others had abandoned it early.

From this highly mixed group of around a dozen who will easily challenge one another there didn't seem to be a saving grace. I decided it had been written hurriedly, others decided that someone had given the author the initial idea and she'd written it up but not added anything. It could have made a short story, maybe based around a one hundred word concept.

I'm intrigued though, by the slick marketing and promotion that the novel seems to have attracted. People with photographs holding it by their library. Many dozens of adoring positive reviews on Amazon. Something doesn't quite add up.

A vox pop of reviewers hiding a riotous crowd close to madness?