Human connection and the right to meaningful work frames new Anakana Schofield novel.
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Set in a rundown, Wi-Fi free worker’s co-operative, the building is filled with workers who are offering an unplugged service of face-to-face communication. You know, IRL (in real life) conversation.
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“We remain aged cheddar to the slippy-slappy slice,” says the narrator about the analogue inhabitants of the co-operative.
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“This novel is a gospel according to the workers, but it’s also a gospel according to being human and having time, and seeing other people, and recognizing people’s labour, seeing people in their jobs,” said Schofield, who is a native of Ireland but has called Vancouver home for years.
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A love letter to labour, the book’s characters/workers/a kind of Greek chorus are identified by the names of the rooms they work out of, which include: Single Man with a Table Room, The Human Car Wash Room, Giraffe Room, Scrabble Room, Virginia Woolf Room, History of Public Transit Room and many, many more.
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Often funny — there is a “Conniptions and Consternation Committee,” and an “Office of the Thought Warden” — the novel sees various workers engaging, and sometimes fighting, with each other while uniting over the fact that their beloved “library” may be closing as fewer clients are using their services and greedy real estate developers are hungrily circling the building.
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“We have this big crisis with housing. Housing has become this horrible currency,” said Schofield. “I mean, even today, look at this ridiculous bailout for these developers. It’s just monstrous.
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“Then I was thinking about within relationships we also house each other. And then, of course, in the workplace, we more than have to house each other. Of course, with the pandemic, that was all disrupted.”
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Delivered in an absurdist fashion, the novel warns of social extinction as it holds a mirror up to today’s tech-dominated, unaffordable world.
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“I know that it’s kind of surreal and it’s confounding, and maybe some readers will find it overwhelming, but I guess I’ll just argue that, at this point in time, all day long, everything on the news is surreal and confounding. So, I don’t understand why art wouldn’t respond to that with that,” said Schofield, whose previous books include Malarky and Bina.
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Schofield says that her job as a writer isn’t to make life easy for the reader. Instead, she hopes challenging prose will compel people to spend more time within the pages of books.
