Most books you think are good have a great story. A natural and kind progression, something with which the reader can be sympathetic, and something they enjoy. Most books that are considered an ‘enjoyable read’ will couple emotive and exciting writing with good story and make the reader happy to be reading that book. This book is a notable exception: it was very good but it absolutely did not make me happy.
It’s always interesting reading books that are a little more experimental in nature, less ‘page-turner’ more ‘page thinker’, each now page making you consider the writing style, consider the way this weaves into the narrative, adding more or less suspense depending. Beautiful Bureaucrat is not quite fully experimental but is certainly an interesting take on usual narrative structure. World-building gives way to claustrophobic character description, detailed emotional analysis is replaced with first hand indication of personal feelings. All this creates a feeling, an unease as you read, as though you’re missing key aspects, where instead of being an omniscient observer we have just as much information as the exhausted protagonist, clutching at any bites of truth we can within the narrative.
The real feeling and the focus from the start in this book is claustrophobia, it’s the feeling of being trapped over and over, of being unable to avoid situations due to circumstances well beyond your control. It’s layers upon layers of entrapment and the feeling over powerlessness. From the off it’s explained how they were forced out of their apartment, forced into a sublet, forced to have their things in storage, no option but to take the terrible job and on and on and on throughout the story. At the end we feel as though there is a sense that maybe she is pulling things together, perhaps she is starting to escape the impossible loop. Well I won’t say what happens but I’m sure you can guess. There’s a futility to the story, which is reflected by the writing style, a shortness somehow showing a lack of hope with each sentence. The abrupt nature of her realisations and collapses making us feel… well hopeless.
A major thing to talk about though is the character. It’s one of the few things I really disliked about the story. It must have been deliberate I feel because there’s no way that you could accidentally make a main character so pathetic. Looking at it closely it seems that we’re supposed to feel it, we’re supposed to see that this isn’t your usual heroine, she’s a normal everyday person trapped in her situation, having to take what is given to you because in real life magic potions don’t exist, surprise fairy godmothers don’t turn up and you definitely rarely get a full happy ending and closure. Even at the end when she feels she has found this one magic way out of her current doldrums, it is instead ripped from her, torn away because of something as simple as human error. There are no elements to this story where she is put up on a pedestal, there’s no supernatural or improbable circumstance where we feel that she’s able to run away or lead the story herself, instead she’s like so many of us, she’s slave to the whims of powers beyond her control.
As you can probably tell, this was not a cheerful read for me, or in fact for any of my friends who’ve also read the book, not of course that it’s supposed to be. It touches a nerve, it hits home a little hard and it feels… more than a little uncomfortable to read. The darkness, the lack of control, the unknown factors that constantly play as you make your way through the pages wrap the story up and drag you in as you go through. It’s lucky the book is short (180 pages) or else you’d likely drown in the suffocating sucking down of the grey bureaucratic building. Perhaps I’m reading into it a little too much, but as a child of the recession, the generation that’s been forced into taking whatever job we can, not the ones we want, of having our habits dictated and our lifestyles funnelled into very specific streams - and told that we should be grateful for it - the messages of claustrophobia and restriction that ring out from the pages of the Beautiful Bureaucrat speak closely to me. Even the rising hope of a happy ending being brought closer and closer make you feel like perhaps, somewhere somehow there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Spoiler alert: There isn’t.
So to sum up, although I didn’t ‘like’ this book, it was absolutely a good read. Its shortness meant its bleak outlook was manageable, the style it was written with was interesting and something new, holding a fog over the story provided a restricting closeness that we’re not used to in most prose. It was not enjoyable though. It hurt to read for a plethora of reasons, from personal hurt to empathetic struggle the reality of this book is that if you want something nice to distract you from the day to day doldrums, this is absolutely not for you, because it turns the triviality of existing in those doldrums around and displays them naked for you to see.