Book of Pages - Poop of Ages
David Whiteland has written a book. A book about the modern condition. A book about how technology, promising to simplify, complicates. Being a book, it has pages. David Whiteland has called his book the Book of Pages. Simple, you see. David Whiteland thinks he is very clever indeed.
The Book of Pages is a 'technological fable', presented in a quasi-comic book form, with each page devoted to a different aspect of the modern condition - our reliance on numbers, the usurpation of human function by machines, the atomisation of society, etc. Each page includes an illustration, a device which adds little to the book other than as a welcome distraction to the dull prose; prose which aims to be stark and minimalist but in fact reads as cumbersome and trite ("The monks live in a monastery. After all, that is what the word means; it is what the place means." I mean, for fuck's sake). Halfway through, Whiteland desperately tries to eke some meaning out of this format through a 'clever' little trick, which of course I won't spoil for you, suffice to say that it is spectacularly banal.
The plot centres around Jiriki, a monk of an unspecified religion, and his journey from his monastery in the hills into the futuristic Metropolis. Arriving in this accelerated modern world, this would-be idiot savant finds himself baffled by, well, everything - the fact that the human experience of flight contains none of the obvious characteristics of flight (rush of air on skin etc.); the formlessness of money; the rationale behind fast food. As Jiriki progresses further into the core of this metropolis, it is suggested to the reader, with immense subtlety , that maybe our reliance on technology has gone too far, and maybe we could learn a little from this simpleton monk and his down-to-earth, honest-to-goodness country ways.
Perhaps I'm just an unreconstructed urbanite, but I found this neo-Luddite guff difficult to stomach. In fairness, the characters are engaging, and Jiriki's wide-eyed innocence makes him a likeable protagonist. Whiteland does, I suppose, come out with a few challenging and fresh questions - particularly his ruminations on the quality of 'aliveness' and what it can mean in a world where machines can replicate and surpass human function (he concludes that it is "a quality whose only role is to be a quality").
But for the most part, the book is bogged down in lazy, preachy, reactionary drivel, including some suspiciously right-wing crowing about the lack of responsibility and fault in modern society. His obsession with numbers and their ubiquitousness dominates the book, but not to any discernible purpose.
Whiteland intends a probing critique of modern society's belief in better living through technology, but the Book of Pages comes across as the result of a few conversations in a vegetarian pub scribbled down on recyclable beermats (in fact, his website claims that the Book of Pages was an improbable three years in the making). It's the literary equivalent of your mum telling you to go play outside because the real world is much more interesting than TV (yes, mum, reality is great, that's why I watch Big Brother).
Finishing this book, I imagined Whiteland staring smugly at me, eyebrow arched, encouraging me to eat my (organic) greens and to reflect on the fact that Eskimos use every part of a reindeer or something. Maybe this stuff made sense in the 80s, I don't know: but now it's just patronising and banal.
Oliver Holtaway
9th Nov 2000