Review: 84K, Claire North

I’ve been trying to recapture the magic of Claire North’s second novel, Touch, for three books now. Harry August was like Diet Touch, The Sudden Appearance of Hope was a bit boring, and The End of the Day dragged so much I didn’t finish it. “Ah well,” I said to myself, “so Claire North is a one-hit wonder for me. SO BE IT.” And then just when I thought I’d gotten out, she lured me back in with 84K, a dystopian novel in experimental-but-not-too prose about a man who leaves his comfortable life behind in favor of burning down the whole world.

If the satire in 84K feels a bit obvious, chalk it up to our living in a painfully obvious time in history. The government has outsourced many (most?) of its functions to The Company, of which there is only one: Take a look at any business in the nation and you’ll find it’s owned by a company that’s owned by a company that’s… Theo Miller — that’s not his real name, it’s just what he calls himself — works at the Criminal Audit Office, assessing the amount people will have to pay for the crimes they’ve committed. If they can’t pay, they go to the patty line, hard labor to make up for the costs their crimes incurred.

When a woman from Theo’s past appears, begging him for information about her long-lost daughter, Lucy, he helps her a little and then wants to stop being involved. He has worked hard to be invisible (Theo Miller isn’t his real name; it was the name of someone who’s dead now), and he has no intention of letting his life fall apart for Dani Cumali, a long-ago friend and maybe more who lives her life on the patty line. But Dani tells him, “Lucy’s your daughter,” and then she’s murdered. The murderer is a hired hand for a subsidiary of the Company. Theo doesn’t think it’s likely that Lucy really is his daughter. But.

84K is far darker than any of Claire North’s other books to date (though as I say, I didn’t finish the one about death), so please take a substantial content warning for child harm, sexual violence, physical violence — you name it. Anyone who can afford to pay the indemnity for a crime can afford to commit the crime, and the wealthy of the world take grim advantage of that fact.

What’s more disturbing, in the present American political moment, is the feeling that none of what Theo does — or anyone does — matters. They can reveal that the Company has dug mass graves for workers on the patty line who died of starvation or illness or unsafe working conditions, but the fact is that everyone already, essentially, knows that to be true. Everyone knows, and nobody knows how to change it. The scope of what Theo wants to do — rescue a girl who may or may not be his daughter — is very small, because small change is the only change that seems possible in this world.

Though 84K is on the long side, its plot zips by, with the ever-present threat of Company violence looming over all of Theo’s detective work. I didn’t love the dude-is-motivated-by-lady’s-death plot here and wished I could read a book about Dani burning down the world instead of Theo; but I will say that all of Theo’s major allies in the fight are women. Dani sets him on the path, a woman called Neila finds him bleeding in the street and helps him recover, and there are several other spoilery women he teams up with later on and unexpectedly. Even so, and even knowing that Theo’s averageness is the point North is making, 84K did play into an existing frustration of mine about stories that insist on celebrating white male mediocrity.

What really shines about 84K is North’s prose. Theo lives in a world that requires its citizens to leave many things unsaid that are known by everyone, and the writing leaves space for things to go unsaid.

At the weekend he has money for drink, or can walk by the river without a card in the world, or take a bicycle out into the countryside and let the sunlight wash away the work, and when he returns to his soft bed

he is better

can work better, do what he needs to do, better, and one day

if he works hard enough, earning through his labours

one day maybe someone else will turn down the duvet in the corner of his bed and someone else will press the smell of cleanliness into his fresh-washed clothes and he need not scrub at dishes and argue with the water company and stand in line for the bus that never comes because these things are fundamentally

not the things he is best at
he can give
so much more to this world
so much more

if he’s just given the opportunity to do it.

This is not an unfair position.

The Company requires this kind of thinking, that jumps from one thought to another while ignoring, or trying to ignore, the human cost of the way one is choosing to live one’s life. As a comparison and to gauge whether this book is for you, North’s writing in 84K reminded me of White Is for Witching, my favorite of Helen Oyeyemi’s books.

Before we go, some stuff: The book knows that both men and women buy sex, but it tends to assume that only women and girls sell or are sold for sex. (Not true.) In a brief flashback section from a trans character’s point of view, North says “Once upon a time Neila was a man called Neil” and uses the wrong-body explanation of transness (here’s Janet Mock on why she doesn’t like this trope).

My biggest issue — surprise, surprise for a dystopian story — has to do with representations of disability. It’s fairly clear that Theo’s is a society that values normative bodies and minds, insofar as it values bodies and minds at all. We see some cases where indemnities for murder are higher if the murdered person belonged to a gym, and lower if the murdered person was disabled, but North doesn’t engage with the stories of any of those people, with the consequence that their tragedies feel like set dressing for the (non-disabled) characters’ efforts and epiphanies.

Towards the end of the book, our protagonist goes to see a badly injured ally in the hospital, and she’s just able to write the word END, instructing him to take her off life support. Though the character’s not exactly saying that a disabled life isn’t worth living — if she lives, she’ll be in the power of her extremely wicked son — the scene is all too resonant of the Bury Your Disabled, Type 3 trope. All in all, it paints a picture of a writer who engaged very very shallowly with disability when envisioning her fictional world.¹

Though her disability rep leaves a lot to be desired, Claire North has managed to write a satire that I didn’t hate — a satire of corporatism, no less! — and created a believably terrifying fictional world. Read it if you wish to be unsettled.