From its rather striking cover (which evokes the Penguin Classic designs of the 1960s and 1970s with eye-catching yet simple graphics) to the central premise, CONQUERGOOD AND THE CENTER OF THE INTELLIGIBLE MYSTERY OF BEING feels like a holdover from an earlier era of dystopian fiction. The Great Fall has happened, and protagonist Jerome Conquergood—“a social leper, a machine without a soul”—finds himself living in a world dominated by an all-encompassing government that rules with an iron hand.
Author C.G. Fewston’s take on post-apocalyptic society puts one in mind of Orwell’s 1984. The year is 2183; we have the Korporation—which has dismantled democracy and erected its Elite. As in 1984’s London, citizens are constantly surveilled, and posters everywhere proclaim governmental slogans. In Conquergood’s world, those posters are also equipped with tiny loudspeakers; and, as in 1984, nomenclatures have not endured: Conquergood lives in the United Subsidiaries of the Ameliorated, or USA, and New York’s Greenwich Village is now known as Ward 15. Finally, Klaire—otherwise known as KNE1-2-U—is Julia to Conquergood’s Winston Smith.
However, Fewston’s focus is not on the warp and weft of this dystopia, but rather on his protagonist’s place in it. After an “education” at the hands of Korporate “lecturers”—Conquergood puts one in mind of a more compliant and feckless Number Six—he is accepted as a “Turnkey Specialist” and hailed as a key figure in the Korporation. Once inside the structure, he learns of the Korporation’s plans to perfect humankind, as well as to ruthlessly eliminate opposition to their power.
The novel is suffused with fine detail, but it never coalesces into commentary on, say, rampant corporatism in the style of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (in spite of a few deft satirical touches, such as references to wars on indolence, pedagogy, and insolvency). Conquergood, around whom so much of the story revolves, is strangely anonymous. Given to absorbing great works of the Western canon in a vaguely transgressive way, he lacks other defining features. Events rarely happen to him, but rather around him. In the second half, the story picks up speed; some of the work’s most interesting material derives from the clash between the sterile environments in which the Elite live and the lives of the “outkasts” in the bombed-out, obliterated remains of Western civilization.
Fewston also seems unwilling to clamber off the fence in relation to the transhumanistic themes that come to the fore later in the book. Depending on one’s point of view, this is either a feature or a bug. In earlier times, it was easier to be morally ambiguous in this fashion. But in today’s febrile world, this reviewer felt that a more strident statement on the moral rectitude of aiming at immortality (virtual or otherwise) would have been the better call.
Although a somewhat incompletely drawn protagonist and a notably ambiguous approach to its main themes detract from the story, C.G. Fewston’s CONQUERGOOD AND THE CENTER OF THE INTELLIGIBLE MYSTERY OF BEING is suffused with fine detail and benefits from intricate worldbuilding.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader