The Circle

The Circle is heavy handed in its message about the dangers of allowing a private technology company remarkably like Google too much access to customers' private information and too much influence over social and political life. Its main character, Mae, a recent college graduate who is thrilled to land a job at The Circle in the beginning of the novel, transforms from new employee who takes solitary kayak trips to relieve stress and feels outraged when her privacy is invaded, to an always-on-camera company spokesperson who mercilessly hounds a former boyfriend who has rejected social media.

Mae's transformation doesn't come with any psychological underpinning, though. We see her acquiescing to her bosses' assertions that if we're being watched, we won't do bad things, and that sharing our activities is an act of generosity to others, but we don't understand why she allows herself to be convinced and why she becomes such a true believer.

In spite of the un-subtle message, and the thinness of Mae's character, this novel made me feel queasy about posting on social media and using Google for search, email, creating documents and storing photos. I'm liable to feel queasy about it from time to time anyway, but this book reminded me that technology companies like Google are profiting from my freely providing them with data about myself.

In my opinion, this book is not so much a ‘story' as it is a depiction of a dystopian world that we are all too close to becoming. I believe the author wished to exaggerate the trends in the hope that people will turn from this horrible vision. I've given this book a good rating because I see these trends, and hope that readers of this book will fight to regain some of our privacy. (How ironic is it that I'm posting on a social network, applauding a book that decries social networking?)

Before I consider crushing all my computing devices and hiding in a forest somewhere, I'd like to turn away from the political statement of the book, to discuss a couple things that struck me as weaknesses in the story. The main character, Mae, is a caricature. How can the reader be expected to believe her casual attitude toward sex with complete strangers? What sort of mental illness would cause her to willingly give up her entire identity to devote every waking hour to the company? Sorry if this offends anyone, but this character strikes me as a ‘bimbo' - easily swayed by the charisma of the cult leader to the point where she just can't think for herself.

The author also brings in an almost irrelevant story line about some deep sea creatures. They are probably only in the story so that he can say that the company is like the shark - consuming everything in its path. I was distracted from the story, wondering how these creatures who were accustomed to tremendous water pressure could survive in what was described as an unpressurised tank.

Meh. There's a lot I didn't like about this, aside from the issues raised by a totalitarian social network.

The sex scenes were bizarre and unnecessary, with lines like “...so deep she could feel his swollen crown somewhere near her heart,” and Mae daydreaming about how “She wanted to be back in that bathroom sitting on him, feeling the crown of him push through.” Bleh. I can't imagine a woman ever thinking about sex this way.

The dialog seemed largely interchangeable, so most characters working at the Circle could well have been the same person, Bailey seemed exactly the same as the people working at HR. Most of the plot was driven by pedantic dialog of some higher up person grilling Mae until she agrees that she was wrong, and the Circle is wonderful. Mae lacks any depth and just serves as a sponge to absorb the Circle's dogma.

Also, there's an allegory throughout the book involving a shark harvested from a deep sea exploration of the Mariana Trench, and they put it in an aquarium and watch it eat an increasingly weird selection of animals, sea horses, a tuna, an octopus, an entire sea turtle, for seemingly no reason. It's such a heavy handed metaphor for the Circle, which is annoying in it's own right, but also was so scientifically impossible that I just got frustrated every time they kept coming back to this stupid aquarium. You can't take a creature living in the conditions of the Mariana Trench, raise it to the surface, and then expect it to survive in a normal salt water coral filled fish tank.

I finished the book feeling entirely frustrated. The upside was that the audiobook narrator was excellent, and it did keep my interest well enough to want to finish it.

I thought this was an interesting concept, and I liked the “cultish” fashion the company embraced their employees (separating them from their family and friends) and brainwashing them (keeping them up with work and events, keeping them so busy with no time to think). The sex scenes were truly bad, and some of the writing was as well. It was a bit predictable, but I still felt compelled to listen to the end.

I wanted to like this book, or at least appreciate it. Seeing the trailer for the movie and reading the description for the book made it sound like an interesting near-future thriller. I still have hopes for the movie, but not see-it-in-theaters level hopes, more like catch-it-on-Netflix ones.

The book is at least competently written, but I still gave up on it halfway through and skimmed a bit near the end to get some closure. I just couldn't care enough any more, and not even making snarky notes on my bookmark index card was helping. The social commentary was too ham-fisted, none of the characters were really likeable, and I found myself wanting to tell all of them to take a long walk off a short pier wearing the finest in cement footwear.

I guess this was supposed to be some terrifying commentary on our world a'la-A Brave New World. However, like ABNW, The Circle imagines a world to an extreme that makes it seem cartoonish.

Mae is an idiot, an unbelievable character. And the “antagonists” to The Circle (the company that the book is named for) are not likable or are able to make compelling arguments. (Granted, everyone working for The Circle seems braindead, so there's that.)

I prefer my apocalypses more... elegant. I'll stick with Orwell.

flat, unlikable main character, banal prose (sparse but not in an exciting way, just seemed like he couldn't think of the words), sex scenes were gross and weird (the ones that were meant to be good were the same as the ones meant to be bad). plot was flat, predictable, unoriginal, hamfisted etc. etc.
shit sucks.

This book was showing what could happen to us when everything is totally controlled. When I started reading, I thought, it was an imagination which seems to be far away. But in the process of reading this book, it seemed like today. Like today in a couple of years, like what happens if everything is known, everybody is watched.
I really liked this book, it wasn't very hard to read, it was very well written, with everything a good book needs, making the reader to laugh as well as to cry and the most importantst: To think.
This was really a book to think about and I really liked that.

Look, I kind of get what Dave was trying to do here, and it's very clever but this book just TRIES SO HARD. I don't think it helped that the humour totally went over my head, I think as someone who suffers from anxiety the scenes where Mae is frantically trying to get her ratings up just didn't resonate.l and I just despaired at the deliberately awful sex scenes. The characters veer from Mae being impossibly naive and totally gaslit by the company to her former boyfriend who is annoyingly preachy. I think because we see things so much from Mae's point of view, the other characters are not really developed, and it can be quite easy to become wearied of her constant navel gazing and selfishness, which is hammered home at every opportunity. Instead of allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions, the author puts huge red lights around everything, signs pointing to where to laugh, where to feel shocked and where to marvel at his brilliance. It didn't have to be written in such a simplistic way, give the reader some credit. Honestly, though Infinite Jest is a complex behemoth and DFW is ‘problematic' to put it mildly, it's far more memorable in comparison.

Very much not the book I was expecting – and that's probably good. I was expecting a kind of techno thriller along the lines of a bunch of other books (did anyone ever read Format C? I loved that book when I was a kid ). What it turns out to be is a satire. And it provoked much more thought in that way, I think. The thoughts it addresses are far from new but the way in which they're presented had me defending myself and my own worldview in the context of the implicit criticism.

It's still a bit shallow and oddly paced, but I enjoyed it and I'd probably recommend it.