Susan Greenfield, 2121: A Tale From the Next Century (2013)

I reviewed this book for the Guardian. Go there, to read the shorter, I daresay leaner version of the copy I originally submitted. The original is below. You can take this as an object lesson in the job a sub-editor does, purging prose of flab:
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It is sometimes the case that an individual famous in a non-literary sense decides they want to write fiction. To the ranks of Bertrand Russell, Mussolini and Julie Burchill we can now add eminent neuroscientist Susan, Baroness Greenfield, internationally renowned Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at Lincoln College Oxford, former director of the Royal Institution. People often say they ‘have a novel in them’. By publishing 2121 Greenfield has proved that she actually did have a novel in her. Unfortunately it’s a very bad novel.

How is it bad? Let me count the ways. It is badly conceived, badly realised, badly characterised, badly paced and above all badly written. In fact, ‘badly’ hardly does the prose style justice. It is catastrophically, hilariously, chew-your-knuckles-whilst-reading, Plan-9-From-Outer-Spaceily written. On the plus side, the typeface is nice and I quite liked the front cover art.

2121 is a novel with a thesis: that the current vogue for checking Twitter on smartphones and watching YouTube videos of cats doing endearing things is actually a profound pathology of humankind. This, of course, is Greenfield’s ‘Internet Addiction Disorder’; one of her more controversial ideas.

In Greenfield’s imagined 22nd-century the pressure of IAD has bifurcated humanity into two groups. On the one hand are the Hedonists, all of whom live inside geodesic domes playing video games, and who lack any concept beyond the now of immediate gratification. On the other side of the mountains are the ‘N.P.’s, ‘neo-Puritans’, ‘neo-Platonists’, living in square grey domiciles with grey fixtures and fittings and wearing grey clothes. Their lives are rigidly timetabled and regimented. They dedicate themselves to intellectual pursuits, especially neuroscientific research. They don’t play video games.

It’s an improbable extrapolation from the present, and the novel’s worldbuilding is airless and unconvincing. But let’s give that a bye, as a thought-experiment. What about the story? Well, for the first hundred pages of this 400-page novel nothing at all happens. Then an N.P. neuroscientist called Fred is sent into the land of the ‘Others’ to research them. He makes this journey by bicycle. This bike plays a major part in the novel (indeed, it’s a more convincing character than most of the human beings) and Greenfield repeatedly tells us its colour. It is ‘lilac’. It has ‘a distinctive lilac colour’.

Fred infiltrates one of the Others’ geodesic domes, becoming romantically involved with a woman called Zelda whilst performing neuroscientific research on a younger female called Sim. ‘Do I really want power?’ Fred ponders. ‘What I really want is to escape on my lilac bicycle.’ Later Fred copulates (Greenfield’s preferred term) with Sim also, which causes Zelda a degree of jealousy. ‘I heard as though he had spoken at five hundred decibels. I was deafened, and the abyss cracked apart to open up yet further depths. I tumbled down blinded into a blackness that was utter, complete, final.’ Poor Zelda! ‘The cold dead heart inside me grew heavier and heavier until I was entirely just that, a cold heavy lump. Plodding towards what end?’ Sim is upset too: ‘an unlovely trail of colourless fluid was inching unchecked from her nose. But her chin was still pointed upwards though perhaps teetering on defeat.’ And Fred? ‘I have no significance,’ sighs Fred. ‘I now feel too sad and small to ride the big, carefree bicycle.’ Turns out life is a complicated thing, even in the 22nd-century.

How hard it all is, once a path bifurcates and bifurcates, and bifurcates again, and you need to go down all the roads but then the roads don't meet up and there you are on your bicycle wondering where you are actually going.

Like Dan Brown, Greenfield is fatally drawn to adjectives, particularly of colour (‘Talking Head, a dark man, [was] positioned between Fred's bright red seat and Sim's turquoise sofa’); and like Brown she is capable of sentences that simply boggle the mind: ‘Fred seemed to shake himself mentally’; ‘She sat forward again, her body deflating, put both arms now, folded, on the table’; ‘Fred looked far away, then visibly jerked himself back to me’; ‘The moment can fatten, swell, bloated with the reliving of recent times with Fred, looking and listening to that creased smiling face’; ‘The sudden thud of silence was heavy and suffocating’; ‘The face, almost eye-level with mine despite its fleshy folds, seems constituted of granite’; ‘Though rooted to the spot in front of me, everything about her was on the move’. The prose shifts tense queasily from past to present, and Greenfield appears innocent of the rule that a verb must agree in number with its noun (‘There was still no alarm bells’). But she differs from Brown in one respect. Brown is readable; he tells a story that moves briskly along. Greenfield’s glacial, repetitive narrative does not, clogged with myriad indigestible mini-lectures on neuroscience, most of them from Fred—'He was speaking in unremitting chunks' is how one character puts it. It’s too painfully true. I finished the book and laid it down rather as Fred lays down his lilac bicycle: ‘He had let the bicycle fall. It lay on its side, its wheels still slowly revolving, suddenly awkward, unloved, and lovely no longer.’