Book Review : Olga Ravn - The Employees (2018)

Nov 19

Nov 19 Book Review : Olga Ravn - The Employees (2018)

When I was working the dead end job that lead me to start this site, I had a yearly evaluation with my boss where he gave me a 4/5 for attendance even if I didn’t miss a day. I took one sick day (which I’m legally allowed to take) and that’s it. I'll never forget what he answered me when I told him that. "Charlie (our director) doesn't care. He sees you as a production unit. If you’re not on the floor working, you’re handicapping the entire flow of production, so he doesn't care what or why of your absence."

I thought about that a lot when reading Olga Ravn's The Employees.

The Employees is a tiny novel (just over a hundred pages) written as a series of employee reports from a spaceship orbiting a distant planet. The crew (comprised of humans and human-like androids) is at odds since completing the mission of retrieving a series of alien objects and the corporation owning the ship have sent impartial mediators to try and understand what the fuck is going on. These objects have a profound effect on the crew members who’s lives have been mundane and repetitive on the ship.

Marginal Storytelling 101

It took me a while before I understood what the hell I was reading. The Employees is a series of idiosyncratic first person accounts of what’s going on in the spaceship and you kind of have to figure out they’re in a spaceship and dealing with alien artifacts to begin with, but it works. The best part is that the characters are doing all the work. They each reveal details about life inside the ship that eventually link up to one another to create a bigger, more complex picture.

But even then it stays weird and unsettling. Because as the characters' lives start intertwining with one another, it becomes difficult to differentiate human from androids unless they specify it themselves. As the alien artifacts are awakening the conscience of automatons built to work, the line between humans and machines start blurring. I mean, Olga Ravn isn’t the first author to question humanity in science fiction, but the way she does it is not only unjudgmental, but it leads to greater questions.

As the humans are longing to return to Earth, the androids are waking up to a whole new world of possibilities that exceed the limits of their programming and it reflects in the way they’re talking on the page. The androids appear somewhat sympathetic and upbeat as the humans are more low and melancholic. Ravn underlines that hardcoding is embedded in both humans and machines and that the experience of being alive is to challenge and expand on its boundaries.

It's a celebration of transhumanism of some sort.

I’m not gonna spoil the ending, but…

When you finish The Employees (and not a page before), it becomes clear that it’s a super blunt analogy for the contemporary workplace, the culture of productivity and corporate dynamics as the titular employees are judged according to their utility to the mission and not necessarily for the state of their mental health or their new, blooming self-awareness. There's a brutal dissonance between what the employees are saying and how it’s being treated in a corporate report format that makes this novel sort of mesmerizing.

So yeah, The Employees used the narrative voice and social codes of a corporate entity in order to eschew emotional stakes from its story as much as possible even if the characters are brimming with every possible manifestation of humanity available in our collective lexicon. In an era where work is celebrated and entrepreneurship is sold as the key to personal freedom, reading a story like this serves a stark reminder that individual existence is the fuel to corporate existence and that fuel is combustible.

I didn’t even know The Employees existed until a dear friend of mine lended me her copy. She thought I would love it and she was right. Although Olga Ravn made me work, she delivered something of a brutal and profound reflexion about the contradictory nature of corporate society and individual freedom and she did not even have to set her novel on Earth to make it work. I know little to nothing about Danish literature, but a novel like The Employees will appeal to anyone willing to dig in.

Oh, and don’t let anyone ever call you "a production unit". Walk out on your employer and don’t come back if he ever does.