Albert

Not really digging the main character. Too apathetic.

This was a vacation read, started on my recent trip to Italy, which involved long rides on a tour bus. It was not the best environment for intense attentive reading, and this novel fit the bill. The prose style is simple and sometimes a little bit quirky, which I appreciated for a light read.

The story follows a teenage girl named Frankie. Over the summer holiday, she meets a boy, a fellow outsider, and together they create a piece of art that they photocopy and post all over town. The poster features a poetical phrase that she composes:

The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are the fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

The posters cause a panic across the country, reminiscent of the real-life Satanic panic that happened in the 80’s. The two of them decide to keep it a secret, and the novel follows Frankie into adulthood as she struggles with the guilt of causing such a widespread panic, and with the consequences of potentially revealing the secret.

While I enjoyed reading the novel, I felt that it ultimately lacked depth. It wants the reader to take for granted that creating the poster was the most significant event that ever happened to Frankie, and also, that revealing her secret would ruin her life. The latter, especially, didn’t land for me. I never really bought into her guilt because I didn’t believe that she had done anything wrong. I think there is a certain type of person who would shoulder the responsibility, and I guess I needed a bit more exploration into why and how Frankie is this type of person. Without a strong sense of her inner life, my objective view of the situation led me to believe that the world around her overreacted to her innocent act, and that she didn’t need to beat herself up about it.

I tried to tell myself not to read this book when I first heard what it was about. I’m already quite cynical about Big Tech, and I thought that this would only entrench my biases further, with no real benefit to my mental health. But I saw it sitting on the shelf at my library and I just couldn’t help myself.

The author, Sarah Wynn-Williams, worked at Facebook in the global policy department, where her responsibility was (ostensibly) to help the company negotiate with countries around the world. She started with the optimism typical of tech companies in the early aughts, believing that she would “make the world a better place.” But over the course of the book, she becomes disillusioned by Facebook’s relentless pursuit of growth and profit, which came at the high cost of creating political instability in countries like Myanmar and ultimately the US.

None of this is very surprising, if you follow the news about social media companies over the last few years. But Wynn-Williams’ position gave her access to the top brass at Facebook, Cheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, and she reveals some really bizarre behaviour by the leaders of the company. For example, Zuckerberg once asked her, on a visit to Indonesia, to organize a “gentle mob,” for no apparent reason other than to make himself look cool. These sections were both hard to read and hard to put down, having the feeling of learning some juicy gossip about someone you don’t like. You kind of have to take her word for it, because corroboration from other sources is not really built into the narrative style, but if it’s true, these incidents confirm the old adage that power corrupts.

Foundation’s Edge was published almost 30 years after the original Foundation trilogy, and you can feel that distance when you’re reading it. The sociological ideas that were at the forefront of the original books are kind of in the background now, replaced by a more conventional sci-fi adventure.

The setup of the novel doubles down on the mind-control conceit introduced in the previous books: Trevize, a councilman of the Foundation, suspects that the Second Foundation is secretly pulling the strings of human history using their “mentalic” powers. At the same time, Gendibal, one of the leaders of the Second Foundation, also suspects that there’s yet another more powerful force out there, mentally controlling them.

For me, this made the mind-control plot device feel tired: if there’s always the possibility that some unseen force is actually calling the shots, then as a reader, I lose track of the characters’ motivations. I also found the two protagonists too similar: they’re both young and arrogant iconoclasts who don’t toe the party line, hunting for a hidden adversary, and to me, the two parallel storylines started to blend together.

(spoilers ahead)

The ultimate controlling force turns out to be a planet called Gaia, and most of the middle of the book is spent hunting for this mysterious world. But then, the characters are also preoccupied with finding Earth, which in the far-future timeline of the story, is an ancient world that has been forgotten. I got confused, thinking that Earth and Gaia were actually the same, but it turns out that Earth doesn’t play a role at all (until the next entry in the series, apparently).

For these reasons, this ended up being my least favourite of the series so far. It really dragged in the middle for me, and the plot is somewhat messy. The ending does introduce an interesting choice for Trevize to make, but we’ll have to see how it pays off in the next book.

It’s impossible to talk about this book without mentioning The One Trick at its centre. You might say it’s a spoiler, so consider yourself warned.

The story is narrated by a nameless woman who works as an actor in a stage play. She meets a young man, Xavier, who claims to be her long-lost son and is seeking a reunion. But she maintains that she never had a son, having had a miscarriage earlier in her life. The third point in the novel’s central triangle is her husband, Tomas, whom she believes is suspicious about her meeting with Xavier because of her past infidelities.

Here comes The One Trick: halfway through the novel, we get a “Part Two” title page, and suddenly, Xavier is indeed her and Tomas’s son. He asks to move back into their home, and they have to re-adapt to his presence. This puts a strain on the family, especially later, when his girlfriend starts to live there too.

The book really drew me in because of how it confused me. Even before the Trick, it makes you question what is reality for the narrator.

Is she in denial about Xavier being her son?

Is she attracted to him romantically?

Is he a con man working a scam by getting close to her?

And of course, in the second half, the questions almost overwhelmed me.

Was the first half just a fantasy?

Are they all pretending to be a family for the sake of the play she’s in, a kind of extreme method acting?

Is she suffering from some mental illness or dementia?

Unfortunately, I didn’t think that there was a satisfying conclusion to the mystery. Based on the title of the book, I think the author’s intent is to show that we’re always “trying out” for the roles that we play in our relationships. We want to be true to ourselves, but we have to perform our parts, whether it be that of a spouse, a parent, or a child. I get it, but I don’t think that the Trick was needed to convey this point.

The book is quite thematically rich, and I think it’s a shame that the Trick distracts from the many profound ideas within. I was constantly preoccupied with trying to understand what was happening, looking for clues that might explain the plot, and I found myself rushing through my read, trying to get to the big reveal (which never came).

The setup of either of the two parts would have provided enough drama—about the boredom of a long-running marriage, about the paranoia that infidelity breeds, about the tragedy of pregnancy loss, about the transition of a child into adulthood—that it seems like a waste to obscure all that by mashing together two disparate realities.