Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
Can you explain your job to your Mum? Anyone who works in branding (yeah, it’s a bit like advertising but…) or consultancy has probably struggled to pass this test. Tom McCarthy’s new novel, Satin Island, tracks the life of U, a corporate anthropologist working for a firm called the Company, on a large international project called… the Project. It’s a timely and thoughtful read on the weird existence of people who look outside the business world in order to feed the machine of corporate life.
U describes his trade as that of an anthropologist, but in a business, as opposed to a tundra or jungle: “Structures of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations: identifying these, prising them up and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light – that’s my racket”.
He describes what the Company does: [It] “advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas – to the press, the public and, not least, themselves. We dealt, as Peyman [the charismatic founder] liked to say, in narratives.”
And he describes his role: “a purveyor of cultural insight […] unpicking the fibre of a culture and let a client in on how they can best get traction on this particular fibre so that they can introduce into the weave their own fine, silken thread, strategically embroider or detail it with a mini-narrative (a convoluted way of saying: sell their product).”
In essence, this is what any consultant, designer, researcher or strategist is doing all the time in trying to create futures for their clients. Reading a book like this is uneasy territory for anyone working in an agency or consultancy, people who live between the lines of the real world and the structures that shape it. Mainstream popular culture about corporate life and corporate individuals deliberately and exaggeratedly shows it all as a bit ridiculous (Office Space, Silicon Valley, Mad Men). They are grotesque examples of broken systems and the often-unwitting players in it, not a reflection of the dual agent role U, or anyone in a similar position, holds.
This book, however, is subtler in showing the complicity between the individual and the system. It’s more akin to William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, where the lead Cayce (physically allergic to brands and selling her services as a cultural barometer to ad agencies) is a hugely sympathetic character caught between an odd vocation and its application. There’s a great line where U says what he does is essentially not that different from the work of soothsayers and ichthyomancers, cutting open fish to gain wisdom from their entrails. “The difference being, of course, that soothsayers were frauds”.
Like U in his work, McCarthy has openly appropriated and repackaged other ideas, through direct and indirect reference to an enormous range of sources. U himself matter-of-factly talks of stealing concepts from French philosophers Deleuze and Badiou to help sell jeans, “leaving out all the revolutionary shit; big retail companies don’t want to hear about such characters”. My favourite reminders were of William Gibson, David Foster Wallace, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Martin Amis and Euripides, but what’s great about this book is that any reader will create their own personal longlist.
With its numbered sub-divisions for chapters, the book is structured like a debrief or final presentation from consultant to client, but one you want to re-read rather than discard for the next project. There is so much strong imagery and so many winding trails of thought and ideas to pore over; this is just a tiny snapshot. For anyone working in this world, it’s thoughtful and funny and offers many further clues for describing your job to your mum, although you may not want to use them at work.