The Circle - David Eggers [Review]

“The Circle” is your typical silicone valley social media tech company, with its expansive campus, its open plan workspaces, and endless job perks. It is no surprise, then, that Mae is excited and optimistic about her new job here.

Her job, in reality, is working in a glorified call centre - she has to answer the queries of customers and then bombard them with surveys until they succumb to giving her a score of 100 for her services. This is mundane and monotonous work, as the book is at pains to point out, and overall it is a pretty brutal working environment; she is pulled aside whenever her score drops slightly, and is questioned regularly when she decides not to attend work social events or post about her private life on social media.

The Circle is already a social media giant, but they are expanding their remit with the invention of some very small wireless cameras. Their objective, as they want you to believe, is full transparency, and therefore full accountability. What if you could know everything about your local politician; access to their meetings and conversations, their diaries, their contacts? If you see something you don’t like, you can vote them out. After all, you only really have a democracy when society can make informed decisions.

For some strange reason, along with several politicians and public figures, the new starter working in the glorified call centre is chosen to be the focal point of this new project, and very soon she is hooked up with cameras to livestream her entire existence to the world, unfiltered.

The whole time you’re reading this you’re wondering where it is going, where it’s all going to go wrong, and what The Circle's master plan could be. Well guess what; nothing happens.

It’s written in such a strange way; tension builds quite early but plateaus for most of the book, and when Eggers tries to build tension again you know not to react to this because you have learnt that nothing will come of it.

The story progresses in a very weird way too, and Mae as a character is much like a Ryvita cracker - flat, plain, and dry. It’s almost like a first-person video game that you’re controlling; Mae will have a conversation with the IT guy only so that he can explain some part of the story to the reader in the least subtle way possible, like a video game cut scene. When the conversation ends, he will say “Oh look it's HR, Hello HR.” Then Mae will talk to the person from HR for a while, and then he will say “Oh look it's your manager, hello manager.” It’s just clunky and clumsy and I did not like it.

The narrative is nothing new either, but The Circle doesn’t even attempt to add anything to the conversation. Instead, it takes inspiration from other books and other stories and simplifies it into a love story set on a dystopian backdrop.

Mae, in addition to being comparable to Ryvita, is very easily influenced, in a way that doesn’t seem realistic at all. She has a strong family network, an ex-boyfriend who remains friendly with the family and some good friends. She chooses to abandon all of these for The Circle, despite the very legitimate apprehension of her friends and family. Her status in the company is elevated rapidly in a way that seems totally impossible, and the abandonment of her only support network was frustrating to read.

The basic premise of this book seems promising - we have a very powerful social media company that is increasing its power and control, faster than anyone working there can control. Now it’s time to explore what the company’s ulterior motives are, how will they achieve this, what the consequences of this are, and if anything can be done to stop this. This type of story is nothing new, but maybe by setting this in the present day the author can add a unique twist to it.

Instead, we have a book that attempts to build tension with several setups and plot lines that never materialise. We have a dull and easily manipulated character, making a series of unbelievable decisions with the sole intention of progressing the story, and a generic love triangle plot that runs all the way through simply didn’t need to exist. As a result, the book is much longer than it needed to be, plateauing early and delivering very little. Maybe the sequel will answer many of my questions, tying the whole thing together in the process, but considering it was written almost a decade after the first one I highly doubt that was ever the intention.