Out of the Way Books: The Employees

Words by: Ursula Holmes

If you’re a frequent visitor to Unity Books Willis Street there's little doubt that you’ve perused the pillar of recommended books. You might even have seen this book with its own handwritten placard imploring you to open its pages and take in the story. Perhaps it’s a little cheeky to start a column called Out of the Way Book with a novel that's already been highly recommended by the wonderful staff of Unity Books. 

In the column's defence, the book wasn’t found on the pillar of excellent reading material. It was tucked between now unremembered titles. It wasn't obvious, it wasn't pulled from the shelf for its place on the shortlists of both the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize and International Booker Prize. It was the ominous cover that led to the purchase of the book. The water filter leaking black liquid from its tank down the white body of the dispenser and puddling on the concrete floor below. 

The Employees by Olga Ravn, a Danish author and poet, is self-described as a workplace novel of the 22nd century. Originally written as an accompaniment for a Danish art exhibition, Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present, The Employees is devastating, poetic, weird, and evocative. As with many dystopian novels, it's not seeking to predict the future but observing instead the modern world in surreal detail. 

The novel is structured as a series of loosely chronological interviews of the workers, humans and humanoids, on the Ship of Six Thousand. The interviews themselves focus on the workers' responses and interactions to a series of alien stones recovered from the planet ‘New Discovery’. As one pages through the interviews, it might perhaps occur to the reader that they are in the place of the unfeeling administration, simply reviewing the report.

In this way the novel asks: What makes us human? Only to answer that question by showing what won't let us be human. That, a workplace is not a home. It cannot love you, it cannot care for you, and it won’t mourn you.

These experiences in the worker’s hands are so painful, so precious as it becomes clear that the Ship of Six Thousand is not a home. It’s a workplace with no friends or family, but coworkers. A place where labour is performed for the sake of labour and the worker’s only saving or damning grace in this antiseptic tank, is the several stones of alien nature that induce sensory responses in any approach.

As a long time worker in hospitality and corporate restaurants. Who hasn’t heard the saying, “if there’s time to lean there’s time to clean,” and so to be left unbothered you pick out an already clean section of wall and wipe it aimlessly while waiting for the next order to come through, it’s impossible to not see the absurdness. The manager knows you’re not cleaning anything, you know you’re not doing anything, and Corporate must know but they’re satisfied by the sight of a worker, “looking busy.” I cannot help but see so many real experiences in the faceless and identity-less interviews of the ship of three thousand.

Threaded between this stripped and soulless environment, straining because of the workplace on the Ship of Six Thousand, is the relationship between humans and humanoids. The humans reminisce of earth and all they left behind. The humanoids in comparison are childlike, exploring in wonder, reaching for their agency. Something stripped from them by design. The tension between each group is not unlike the tension between a parent and child as that child reaches for autonomy and separation of the self. “I may have been made, but now I’m making myself.” Yet both are equal victims to the mangers of their workplace.