I like my media to simmer – both before I get round to consuming it, and after I’ve consumed it. I read Appliance two weeks ago, and since then it has simmered, marinated, pickled – take your pick – in the crevices of conversation and memory. J. O. Morgan’s Orwell Prize-shortlisted Appliance is a slim piece of dystopian writing whose preferred mode of conveying doom is to be philosophical about it. The novel is put together as a series of short vignette-like stories taking place over an unspecified period of time in what seems to be Britain. The only thing these stories are connected by is novel’s eponymous appliance: a grey, minibar-like contraption that seemingly has the ability to transport objects and, soon in the novel, people across great distances, much like a teleporter on your standard science-fiction TV show would.
With its fleeting, vignette-like characters, the book has no human protagonist to speak of. The people in the novel only matter insofar as their relationship with and insofar as they help put together a picture of the machine that promises to usher in a future in which distance is “no longer a barrier to human contact.” Appliance opens in what feels like a late-nineties suburb where Mr Pearson has volunteered, much to the annoyance of his wife, to test out a prototype the scientists at his workplace have been working on. We see two men come in and set up the machine in the kitchen and we see the Pearsons watch with a mix of wonder and fear as a plastic spoon appears in the machine and is then promptly transported back across data lines. We also see, in the background, a Mrs Pearson wonder about the amount of money being poured into the machine, and a couple deeply curious about the wired interior of the appliance. Refusing to linger, Morgan quickly moves on a few years in the future at a point where the ‘boxes’ seem to be everywhere. “Few would remember their installation,” observes Emma, a delivery agent: “or what they had replaced. It was the sort of street object that had somehow always been present.” And indeed, through every subsequent story – from the first-human-trial human to a journalist investigating potential lapses to the mathematician who builds the code – Morgan takes the reader through years during which the machine has become a fixture of progressively dystopian proportions, taking over jobs, monopolizing economic systems, family lives, and very soon mortality itself.
Yet for all of the machine’s juggernaut-like growth and for the book’s persistent buildup of discomfort, Appliance chooses the path of a quiet novel. It discards heavy action in favour of musings on the nature of reality. As it introduces people at various stages in the machine’s life and engaged with it on different levels, it puts together through these quick stories and their conversations the questions that are at the heart of the novel. Time and again, in different settings and with different matters at stake, every story comes down to a debate over whether the machine makes things better or if it makes them worse. Along the way, also opens up the implications of tampering with reality, and what it means for matter to be here as opposed to there.
Morgan seamlessly navigates the economics and the politics inherent in developing and maintaining the machine, following every thread to its logical and consistently haunting end. Just as deftly, he follows through with the persistent yet gradually shifting (in their content and in their motivations) conversations regarding the machine’s relationship with all that is real. Here, Appliance falls back on a Ship of Theseus-like conundrum, while also exploring what Walter Benjamin wrote of in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. A Mrs Carter, who hires the delivery company to assist with her move, decries the machine’s ability to transport one of her paintings. How, she asks, can a work of art made with human hands, with human imperfections and human messiness, work that is now “being taken apart atom by atom and reassembled hundreds of miles away in an instant, how can that ever be the same as the original?”: “It becomes no more than a fake, a mere copy, a false representation of that original,” she declares emphatically. Morgan returns to this in a later chapter, and this time in more serious terms. As machine’s first human trial prepares to go through it every day, he comes back slightly but invisibly changed in ways only his wife can spot.
What makes Appliance so appealing is also its chilling and haunting awareness of the inevitability of the machine’s progression once the first few parts are put in place. Even as dissenters and sceptics continue to make appearances in the novel, the machine’s totality remains a fact most characters seem to have resigned themselves to. Morgan bypasses the science-y question of how the machine works by presenting the problem being not in the fact that it works, but in the fact that it doesn’t not work. It is a circular argument, yet one that is insurmountable within the novel, and one that does an excellent job of conveying the machine’s impending takeover of reality. Here too, Morgan picks the simplest, most seductive logic to illustrate the inevitability: he goes with the “because it’s there” reasoning, complete with its circular nature. We made the machine because we knew how to. The mathematician who builds the code and fixes it over and over again is only doing what he has to in order to build the perfect language to capture reality. Towards the end of the novel, two workers discuss the rumours of the moon being mined for the machine. “Why’d they wanna do a thing like that?” asks one of them: “Oh, I dunno, Pete. I’m just saying as they could, is all. You know? Just saying as they could.” They could, and they did. Appliance, to that end, is an exercise in following the messy logic of doing.
the book deck 