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Everything Has a Price in the Dystopia of Claire North’s 84K
84K begins in medias res: Neila is on the towpath of a canal on the outskirts of London, trying to call an ambulance. A man called Theo Miller lies beaten and bloodied, a severe head wound sending him in and out of coherence. The ambulance won’t come—Neila doesn’t have insurance and doesn’t know if Theo does—and she resolves to leave him. She doesn’t, in the end. She brings him onto her boat, the Hector, which she plies up and down the canals, eking out a meager living. Later, when he revives enough to hold a halting conversation, she almost apologizes for saving him; it is not the done thing. But there’s a code on the water, she says, though no one much respects it anymore.
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You’d take it for the rueful complaints of someone from an older generation—kids these days—but it soon becomes clear Theo and Neila inhabit a grim dystopia where everything has a price, including respect and compassion, and those are dear commodities indeed. 84K treads back and forth through the life of the man sometimes known as Theo Miller, through the history of this deepening corporatocratic state. Theo was 22 when England abolished human rights. It wasn’t long after when the criminal justice system, the press, and the university system withered as well. What were once a web of corporations and the civil institutions beholden to them has become The Company, and everyone’s worth is now dictated by a corporate schema.
The man called Theo works for the Criminal Audit Office, which assigns a monetary value to criminal acts. (Prison was deemed “deeply inefficient,” and replaced with a system of monetary fines.) Manslaughter costs this much for the perpetrator, with discounts if the victim was a low-value person—a drain on the system—like a child with autism or an immigrant. Rape can be dickered down to sexual harassment if the victim can’t cough up the money for a DNA test. Dings for small things, like paperwork infractions, can accrue to insurmountable sums. If the perpetrator can’t pay, they end up assigned to what is colloquially known as the “patty lines,” so named after the first penal jobs making hamburger patties. This is not a good life.
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At a corporate retreat that is ostensibly voluntary (and semi-comically horrific), Theo runs into Dani, a woman whom he’s known since childhood, since before he was called Theo Miller. He spends the next week waiting for the arrest, until Dani finds him again. She demands he help her find her lost daughter, who was raised in a “care home” after Dani lost custody. The home changed the girl’s name to Lucy Rainbow Princess, and rented her out to make commercials. (Care isn’t cheap, and the pay was just enough to keep the children from malnutrition, unless it wasn’t.) Theo has spent his adult life doing everything he can to avoid attracting attention, but he determines to do what little he can to find Dani’s lost daughter. The attraction it draws is almost as terrifying as what Dani can say to unmask him, and helping her will draw him into a conspiracy he’d rather ignore, with a price higher than either of them can pay, even with their lives. The world Theo inhabits could never be described as a good one, but it can, and will, get a whole lot worse. (After all, we know from the first page he will end up near dead at that edge of the canal.)
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84K’s title deliberately invokes 1984, in the same oblique way as Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 nods to George Orwell’s dystopian classic. But the dystopia Claire North builds here is a uniquely British one, with callbacks and allegiances to everything from Brave New World to The Children of Men (the author is British, and more widely read across the pond). Even in our existing world (whether it qualifies as a dystopia or not depending on your point of view), the neighborhoods and waterways of London and its surrounding communities are laid out like a map of the social order. (As a visiting American, I may not know what living in Battersea means, but I can understand the social geography involved.) Though 84K is clearly part of a tradition, I don’t mean to imply it’s some humdrum regurgitation; it has its own unique voice. The narration is deliberately off-putting, written in a form of stream of consciousness that sometimes requires you to double back, or just let go and flow forward.
Unlike Orwell’s Winston, we’re not exactly meant to identify with the man known as Theo Miller. At first blush, he’s more like corporate drone Bernard Marx from Brave New World, but worse, because it seems like he’s chosen to become a coward and a cypher. But North is doing something like the opposite of playing on your emotions; she’s daring you to find compassion in a world that commodifies everything. This is a challenging novel, with an uncomfortable protagonist written in a way that’s distancing and divisive. You’re going to have to work for it, and what it’s worth is no easy equation. Not like life and death in this near future, where everything has a price.