The Castle

I've just read this alongside “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power” and a re-read of Orwell's “Nineteen Eighty Four”.

What's to be said? Prescient? Of course not. Situations are observed and then the theme is seemly drawn further, for (satirical) effect.

We start with the precepts that there are rules and consistency and that systems can be navigated, once navigated documented, then decisions and positions maintained.
Dealing with authority and bureaucracy is fundamentally unbalanced for the individual anyway, when authority then discards or works to undermine these precepts...

Take these factors and inject surveillance, mistrust, informational revisionism and gaslighting.
Where does it lead? Not to comedy. Unsettling and sobering.

Eric Ambler takes similar themes of statelessness, individual vulnerability, but at least Arthur Abdel Simpson, gets some salvation.