Perfect Tense

Michael Bracewell

A couple of days ago I did one of those online quizzes which tests your IQ against your salary. I wasn't going to give you the results but since you're twisting my arm, OK, yes my salary is apparently right down there somewhere and my IQ is right up there in the clouds. Horrendous mismatch apparently. Am I bitter? No way. Right now, I love my job. Which is one of the reasons I hated Perfect Tense. Perfect Tense is one of those novels which oozes intellectual snobbery. Not that it's much of a novel in terms of its plot. Its narrator is a nameless office worker who, without anything really happening to him, describes his day as a banking clerk in a meandering fashion. His central theme is the pettiness and pointlessness of office life and the poverty of imagination he detects in office work. He tolerates (nothing more) his work and knows he will never get the promotions that duller rivals seemingly achieve with ease. His protection against despair is that his self-awareness sets him free. He allows his senses to roam while his seemingly happier colleagues are mere caged animals.

In fact this kind of stuff is surely nothing that any office worker doesn't ponder from time to time and it's snobbery to suggest otherwise. I would imagine that every author who is attempting to write in the evenings and weekends while holding down a dullish day job has at some point churned out this kind of thing only to bin it and move on to meatier and less self-pitying subjects.

Nicholson Baker has covered this kind of territory much more successfully and Dilbert is much funnier. My copy of Perfect Tense has the enthusiastic endorsements of Morrissey and Stephen Fry on its cover. I love those guys but, excuse me, what do they know about being chained to a desk? Actually, in the case of those two, let's not go there. Perfect Tense? More like Perfect Tosh.