This was an interesting take on dystopian fiction, but while it gripped me from the start, I found it an uncomfortable read. The main character finds a job as a bureaucrat in a mysterious building where she initially doesn't know what the data she is inputting means. This mystery and the effect of a lonely, strange working environment on those who work there are what the novel focuses on, which unfortunately makes for a pretty depressing read.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat explores interesting ideas in a unique way, so I'm sure many readers will enjoy it - but it wasn't for me.

Recently published by Pushkin but previously out elsewhere in 2015, it is thanks to Netgalley that I had the chance to read this lovely short tale of a miserable woman in a mundane existence who ponders the point of life – and then a little way in it changes into something quite different.

Trouble is, to talk about it is to explain it – and totally spoil it. Suffice to say, our main character may be Josephine the Average Jo, in a terrible sublet apartment where her and her husband (also an average Jo) seem to be scraping through life in a series of terrible incidents in their average jobs. She finds any job going, and isn’t meant to ask what her data entry is for. Most people in her building seems to be average too – similar outfits, similar hair, similar lunch, similar offices. Turns out, it’s not just any old data entry job. Turns out, she might be playing god without realising it – not that anything is ever really explained: it just is.

This could easily be a play – almost a panto. There are caricatures rather than characters, with silly names, and there are only a few set changes needed – work / terrible apartment / park / diner (and repeat in any order). Her boss is rude and unpleasant, her Dolly Parton / Barbie-esque work colleague well-meaning, the server from the diner an Oracle. Jo is all of us, wanting more from life and dreaming of the future which she once thought would be easy – happy in her job, relationship, owning their own place and starting a family. Yet her life is drab and stark. There are so many little details which will resonate with a readership who work in an office that it would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

Hope seems far away in this story, but once Jo starts to realise more and more about her bureaucratic role, it starts to become much more sinister as well as hopeful all at once. It feels so Philip K Dick to me, and lots of other reviewers cite Kafka. It becomes more than her story, and the plot quickens and thickens at this point, no longer just detailing what happens to her, but what she can make happen – or not.



I read it swiftly, and I think it has the right balance of general plot and then More. Any more depressive and slightly confusing episodes of her life and I would have given up before I got to the Substance – even if normally I would devour anything that Ursula le Guin recommends. But it is totally worth those parts by the end, and everything is beautifully proportioned – even if I can’t really where else the beauty of the title is meant to be.

Give this a try if you like sci-fi things like Adjustment Bureau, Atwood, Dick, Kafka, Keyes…

It is difficult to pin down the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat (2015): a dystopia that reads like a thriller with brief incursions into horror, literary modernism and satire? It’s hard to say. But, by trying too much, and rushing to the tidy end, it might have fallen short of being great in any of these categories.

Josephine is a woman in her early 30s who has recently moved to a big city with her husband Joseph in hopes of finding better jobs and new opportunities. Short on money, they are evicted early in the novel, and are forced to live in a succession of unwelcoming sublets. After a long period of unemployment, Josephine finally finds an office job at a mysterious corporation in a windowless building.

Under the supervision of an unnamed, nearly featureless boss with halitosis, she is assigned the mindless task of comparing paper files to entries on a computer database whose purpose she doesn’t know and is told to ignore. Every day, she sits alone in her small and claustrophobic office, surrounded by pinkish walls marked with smears of fingerprints and the maddening rattle of typewriters.

Gradually, Josephine and the reader begin to suspect that there is something odd about this office: strangers seem to know details of Josephine’s life without being told about it; the bureaucrats she meets in the building look like her; she thinks she is being followed by a man in grey suit; in the vending machine in the office she only finds expired but addictive candy that eventually cuts her tongue; at every sublet she moves to, she receives missed package delivery notifications from an unknown sender. One night, Joseph does not come home, and she feels he is pulling away from her. It seems that the only good thing in her life is disappearing, as though the dullness of the office were slowly taking hold of her.

Simultaneously, she becomes more and more obsessed with understanding what the database means. Her eyes get bloodshot, her skin dries, and even the database language and wordplay start to permeate her mind. It feels as if the office and its database were replacing her relationship with Joseph; as if their life together seemed less real than the eerie corporation she is working at.

The novel is permeated by growing tension and a pervasive sense of dread: the characters are confined in claustrophobic rooms (windowless offices; tiny, dirty sublets full of strangers’ belongings); to make matters worse, the walls seem to be closing in around them. There is a hint at surveillance, as Josephine is victim of vague menaces by her boss. The background has a nightmarish quality (people step on worms; candy cuts your tongue; bad breath smells like poison; typewriters sound like cockroaches; unwanted people are frequently sneaking up when one least expects it), and the database may or may not pose a mysterious threat to Josephine’s life.

The highlight of the book for me is the writing, especially in the second part, where Josephine’s mind seems to be in tune with the database language. There’s a crudeness to the writing, and a bizarre sense of humour. I also appreciate the wordplay and the dark symbols: one evening, Joseph hands Josephine a pomegranate, the “fruit of the dead” according to Ancient Mythology; the fruit offered to Persephone by Hades; the fruit brought to Moses to prove the fertility of the promised land; the forbidden fruit of Judeo-Christian Genesis; and the fruit that, bursting open, symbolises Jesus’ suffering. In another scene, a neighbour had a multi-headed dog that looked like Cerberus, guarding the apartment; a waitress had a green snaked tattooed on her arm, and offered to tell Josephine’s fortune. The database seems to be an omniscient god working according to inscrutable policies, a faceless force, neither bad nor good (“Oh, don’t thank me. There’s nothing benevolent here either. I’m not doing favours, I’m doing paperwork.”).

The narrative cleverly captures the way repetition and boredom take over the mind. It depicts the way poverty and mindless work have a mind-numbing, alienating effect on people, turning them faceless and blind and drained of life, to the point where institution and worker become interchangeable. Finally, it captures well the process of going through midlife crisis: Josephine and her husband are stuck in life, and have nowhere to turn to; Josephine’s paralysis, in particular, is all-consuming: she cannot clean the apartment, go to the post office nor report that her husband went missing. Like Bartleby the Scrivener, she would prefer not to do this.

I also enjoyed the raw treatment of motherhood. Amid Josephine’s fall from grace, in her descent into the database hell, she finds solace in the prospect of becoming pregnant. The tiny beast growing inside her, draining her body from the inside, is the very thing that provides her with vitality enough to fight back the soul-sucking effect of the office.

However, the pieces of your puzzle tie together too neatly in the end, and the book loses in depth. The uncanny aspect that had been the novel’s strength is disassembled and put aside. We have a sense of something more complex being flattened to serve a purpose and fit in a mould. And that’s a shame. I would have wanted for the eerie atmosphere to have lingered a little more, beyond explanations, wordplay or humming typewriters.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat made me laugh on the first page with its description of Josephine’s unfortunately interviewer (I won’t spoil it for you). Josephine wouldn’t, ordinarily, want to work in this rather unprepossessing office, entering a single figure per record time after time in a database, but she and her husband have moved to the city because of an economic crisis and have been forced to lower their sights.

It was easy to identify with Josephine and her husband Joseph – it brings back memories of crappy temp jobs when you perform apparently meaningless tasks over and over with no context or sense of purpose, before returning home to a grotty tenancy, hoping that this is not forever but just the route to a better life. The difficulties for Josephine are lightened by her strong relationship with Joseph, his humour and the small pleasures they find in the everyday.

Despite this, the job does undermine Josephine’s confidence and her identity. There are some nice vignettes highlighting the small humiliations and odd rituals of office life, the stock characters who apparently find this bizarre world normal and comprehensible. Then Joseph starts to behave oddly too, and she begins to question the purpose of her work.

After a promising start, my interest wavered. Although this is a short book it felt too long. The relationship between Joseph and Josephine, which at first was kooky and endearing became too much, like a couple who use their pet names in public. They have little shared games such as wordplay which, endlessly repeated, grate. The mystery around Josephine’s job takes a fairly predictable trajectory and I felt at the end that I hadn’t really learnt anything.

I’m also a bit weary of the trope that administrators are soulless and sinister. Without administration, nothing gets done. What about a book about the quiet heroism of the office manager, coordinating resources and people and systems in a game of three-dimensional chess, leaving the neurosurgeon or maverick entrepreneur or touring orchestra free to shine?

I liked the quirky prose and odd perspective of The Beautiful Bureaucrat so would probably read something else by the author but this feels like it needs more substance and fewer words.

A fantastic and engrossing read with rich writing
Wonderful and truly immersive.

An odd little tale about a couple, Joseph and Josephine, who move to an area where they are both unable to find work. Eventually Josephine gets work in a windowless office in a building full of windowless offices where she enters seemingly meaningless data. This continues monotonously but as Joseph also finds work, they are able to move into better accommodation. The narrative draws you in early as the reader wonders along with Josephine just what the data means, what is going on with strange packages unable to be delivered, the relationship between Joseph and Josephine and eventually how this data can be interpreted. If you want easy answers then you won't enjoy this book for it is indeed Kafka-esque in its presentation. But if you don't mind being carried away into the surreal, then this is an interesting journey.

This is a really quirky book and there's lots of ingenuity and interesting ideas. The plot is intriguing and rolls along but maybe there could have been more mileage in developing some of the plot once the truth about the work place is discovered. Also, some of the stylistic quirks of the narrative voice start off fun, but get annoying fairly quickly in the last half of the novel.

"She carried the Database around inside of her; it floated in her brain like a net for catching and killing any glistening idea that came along."

This is a strange book, it's not really sure what it wants to be; it's part thriller, part magical realism, part exploration of the mundanity of modern life and part completely surreal hallucination. The Beautiful Bureaucrat attempts too much and doesn't quite hit the right note, but I did enjoy reading it and, having been a data drone in my work life, connect with Josephine a lot.

Anyone who's worked data entry will empathise with Josephine. Inputting figures hour after hour can turn your brain to soup and stifle time.
Phillips is great at creating that sort of muffled frustration.

"The distance between four o'clock and five o'clock, between 148 files and 166 files, often felt interminable."

The descriptions in this book are fittingly depressing too; the windowless office, the other working drones, the scarred walls of Josephine's office, they're all wonderfully captured and create a low level of threat and mystery that runs through the whole story. It made me want to read on and find out what, if anything, was behind Josephine's work. But I felt that the narrative kept interrupting itself and cutting the momentum. I found her relationship with Joseph quite dragging. There's lots of introspection but you still never really get a feel for Joseph or their relationship.

It's a shame because some of the characters I found fascinating. Trishiffany (what a name!) is a mix of opposites and a wonderfully unique and confusing character, at times threatening and at others comforting.

There are some excellent elements and writing in The Beautiful Bureaucrat, but it is sometimes weighed down by its own density. I felt like it was trying to do too much.

My rating: 3/5

I received a digital copy of The Beautiful Bureaucrat via NetGalley in return for an honest review. My thanks to the author and publisher.

Most people will be able to relate to the themes of Helen Phillips's thriller-like existential drama which hinges, as the title suggests, on the debilitating, and dangerous, aspects of bureaucracy. Josephine, long unemployed and wearied by unemployment is interviewed at a faceless company by a faceless interviewer (known only as the Person With Bad Breath) for a dull, data-entry job that is never fully explained and which she encouraged not to question. In her grimy, featureless office, surrounded by locked doors, floors she cannot access and a mostly hidden workforce it is clear that whatever her job is it must contribute to some lurking horror. We know this because we easily recognise the genre.

Phillips's satire of recognisably dull lives and the attempt (and in this case, failure) to offset unfulfilling jobs with meaningful home-lives effectively sets up an atmosphere of uncertainty and trepidation by emphasising the isolating tenancies of bureaucracy - the anonymity, the monotony, the ignorance of how a simple task fits into the bigger picture. There is the sense of being trapped. Josephine's featureless office, her limited contact with colleagues, the homogeneity of the few people she encounters - the nightmare of the faceless world - in contrast to the run-down sublets she is forced to occupy with her husband. Places where they struggle to stamp their own personalities over the eccentricities (and squalor) of previous tenants. It draws on classic tales of individual pawns playing unwittingly into large situations they do not understand and the fear of anonymous institutions with extensive and invasive control of individuals.

The influence of Orwell and Kafka is very clear but while their features as classics of the genre are also present here there is little of novelty added in The Beautiful Bureaucrat and it lacks their sustained, deepening menace. The characters have little nuance and are wholly defined by predictable characteristics. In many cases this is certainly deliberate, the Person With Bad Breath is a classic drone; nameless, sexless, with no distinguishing features except a tendency to halitosis, totally dehumanised and defined by his/her role in the company. However this lack of depth also extends to the rest of the cast, despite attempts to dress them up - Trishiffany's ridiculous name, her colourful outfits and brash personality and the overabundance of perky adjectives used to describe her. Even Josephine and Joseph, while they exhibit more personality than the others, do not feel fully developed and lack any real psychological depth. Perhaps this is the point and Phillips's message is that, whatever we believe and however we protest, underneath we are all really as faceless as the Person With Bad Breath or have the potential to become so.

Unfortunately, this lack of depth is a weakness which extends to her unsettling but underdeveloped world. The tension set up in the initial encounters between Josephine and her new situation drains away even as the action itself. The characters' actions and motivations are predictable, they never do anything unexpected and in the end the "big reveal", the answer to what the work of Phillips's every-couple really is, isn't particularly surprising or particularly original. Perhaps the abundance of such tales have simply made us too adept at joining the dots and guessing the conspiracy but the failure to subvert the best-known tropes of the genre creates an oddly impotent tale.

Despite the influx of books, I haven’t read much this week. But I did finish The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips: a short fabulist novel that takes the mundane reality of being a twenty-something pencil pusher in a post-crash economy and turns it into an eerie, unpredictable parallel reality with an element of playing God. I didn’t love reading it at first but it kept compelling me to continue until its absolutely brilliant ending. I can’t remember the last time I celebrated a novel for its ending.

This book reads like an old-fashioned fable, it shows the story of a young couple moving to the city to look for a new life and work.
The female finds herself working in a very monotonous boring office that seemingly sucks the life out of her.
The tale shows how lessons need to be learnt in life, that you cannot have what you wish for without consequences. Choices have to be made for the greater good.
The writing was extremely descriptive, I did find myself a little lost at times. This book would appeal to someone who enjoys storytelling on many levels.
Fans of Kafka would enjoy delving into the meaning behind the storytelling.

The Beautiful Bureaucrat began rather well, but by about half-way through I was very annoyed by it and finished it in a bit of a strop, to be honest. I read it because of an endorsement from Ursula Le Guin, whom I respect greatly, but I rather wish I hadn't.

The story is weird and dystopian. Josephine and her husband Joseph move to a nameless city from a nameless "hinterland" and have to live in a series of squalid, very short-term sub-lets. She, desperate for employment, takes a job in a sinister place where she spends all day in a windowless office, seeing almost no-one other than a couple of sinister, nightmarish characters and performing repetitive inputs to the sinister Database. Her alienation and disorientation grows as the significance of what she is doing gradually dawns on her and we get into somewhat mystical (or possibly sci-fi) realms.

For a while, this was sufficiently atmospheric and intriguing to keep me interested, but I began to tire of it after a while. There is a lot of frightfully clever writing, darling, which is very keen to show us how clever it is, but I thought it was ultimately pretty facile with some very irritating aspects. For example, Josephine's deteriorating mental state is portrayed by her continually jumbling words she has just used, like this: "She didn't know whether pomegranates should be selected based on firmness or fragrance or hue.
Poor me granite.
Pagan remote.
Page tame no."
There really is an awful lot of this stuff and it soon began to feel to me less like a picture of a mind in turmoil than a teacher of Creative Writing indulging herself. (Why was I not surprised to discover than Helen Phillips teaches Creative Writing?) Later, we get this: "His name a synonym for file. Correction: his name a synonym for life." This does have significance in the story, but there is so much high-octane "file-life" writing that I began to think "OK, OK – I get it, but it's just a bit of slightly facile wordplay. No need to go on!" And so on, and so on.

I make no claim to exceptional perceptiveness, but I'm not wholly dim and I simply can't see what the book was ultimately trying to say - if anything. One critic says that it's "a narrative in which the perplexities of work and marriage gradually change their colours to display the perplexities of birth and death". Well, perhaps. Personally, I thought it was the sort of self-indulgent book which creates a stir in chattering circles for a while before being forgotten for a new dinner-party fad.

It would be simple to apply adjectives like Kafka-esque or Orwellian to this book, but that would lazily imply membership of a league to which it certainly doesn't belong. I'm sorry to be so critical, but I didn't like The Beautiful Bureaucrat at all. I have given it a slightly generous two stars because the opening was at least intriguing and it has the immense merit of being fairly short, but it really wasn't for me.

(I received an ARC via Netgalley.)