Recommend: No
Office Novels vary in quality. To get a sense of where Hard Copy fits in the spectrum, I have compiled this handy list of Office Novels that I have read in the last year.
Atrocious (delectably familiar): Low Blows and High Hells – Jill Valentine
Bad: We Had To Remove This Post – Hanna Bervoet
Acceptable but rambling: Temporary – Hilary Leichter
Good, with limited scope: Hard Copy – Fine Veldman
Fantastic: Bright Lights, Big City – Jay McInerney
Office Novels are inherently relatable. We all work in an office. We all hate the office. We are all doomed for what seems like eternity to repeat each office day on a purportedly endless loop until all the air leaves the vents, all the fruit boxes are eaten bare, and all the water dries from the taps.
Yet, at the same time, no one wants to relate to an Office Novel because we read to escape mundanity. Not to go to work. So, if it is not cooked in a confit of sarcasm (Bright Lights, Big City), the Office Novel must be quirky. This quirkiness can come from the type of work itself (social media content moderating in We Had To Remove This Post), or with its play on surrealism (Temporary), or, in the case of Hard Copy, its bond with the physical objects of the office itself.
The narrator of Hard Copy is unnamed. She lives in an unnamed European city of some historic beauty. She could be you; she could be me. Or, put another way, one soulless worker is the same as all workers. Many tourists line the city’s sunny cobblestones, taking photos of canals and admiring the old buildings. The narrator has none of this awe in her life. She is a worker. The scenery that many fly hours to look at forms her daily commute, unappreciated.
The narrator is at a remove to the rest of her office (some kind of start-up). She declines to join lunch dates. Her meetings with her boss are extraordinarily awkward. Oh, and she loves her printer.
During days of monotonous administrative work, our narrator talks to her printer, tends to its machinery and even gives it the odd cuddle. She feels isolated and unable to relate to coworkers. They are career-focussed without gaining any happiness along the way. As an administrative staff member, mostly concerned with printing off leaflets and picking up packages, none of the other employees have anything to gain from interacting with her, so she is socially irrelevant. The point of the story is quite simple: the narrator doesn’t understand her robot-like colleagues and turns instead to the printer for solace.
Of course, the premise is offbeat, but it’s fairly well executed, managing to avoid being twee or annoying.
What didn’t work for me were the two strands of plot, and their inability to cohesively meld. Firstly, there is the obvious setting of the office and the intricacies of its routine and its recognisable characters. Then a second subplot begins to emerge, where the narrator dictates a past tragedy to the printer. This latter recounting is totally independent to the setting of the office and feels tacked on. I like the structure – at first we don’t understand what the italicized sections are, and then come to realise it is the narrator narrating to the printer – but the literal voice of the narrator is unhinged and not that pleasant to read. It’s such shame that the tone and subject matter of this subplot don’t sit right because the main story does such a good job of showing us a woman who is trying to cope with a shitty job.
I liked this novel, it was just a bit limited in scope, which the author overcompensated for with an irrelevant character backstory that was garishly stitched through the chapters.
It was another flash card review recommendation from Bert C. (Town Hall Dymocks). If I am being cynical it might have just been there because of the success of the TV show Severance at the moment. Bert C. was in my bad books for a while thanks to his crap recommendation of Anyone’s Ghost by August Thompson, which I haven’t even finished yet because it is so dull. With Hard Copy, Bert C. is starting his redemption arc, but the jury is still out as to whether he will continue to get my $35 a visit.
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