[ book tip by Robert Adlam ] One is a heart-stopping novel. It examines the extremes to which a society might go in order to secure thought and behavioural control. It’s like reading one’s way through a slow-motion nightmare. There is a moment in the drama that is so shocking, so terribly sad, that it is impossible to continue reading. (I had to take ‘time out’ to recover before pressing on.)

The story unfolds in the Benevolent State – a state that has succeeded in taming its citizens; they stay indoors living out lives of anodyne banality. But the State is proud of itself: all the indices of social ‘well-being’ are positive; it has even dispensed with the concept of punishment: heretics are either re-educated or eliminated. 

Against this backdrop an extraordinary encounter unfolds: Professor Burden, who genuinely believes that he is a good citizen, finds himself brought into the Department of Internal Examination for questioning. Little by little, his examiners find him guilty of the worst kind of heresy: Burden prizes both his personal identity and his independence of thought. The chief interrogator, Lark, sets out, remorselessly, to rid Burden of his ‘illness’. Using every terrible means at his disposal he gradually re-engineers Burden’s mind. Finally, Lark takes the most drastic step of all: he obliterates all traces of Burden’s identity; a new person is constructed and released back into the world of work, the world of social relationships.

But, will this extreme experiment work? Or, is there lodged within most of us, an inviolable sense of autonomous self-hood? To Lark’s dismay, it turns out that his creation, the good Mr. Hughes, still has the capacity to make up his own mind. This time, then, there is no alternative: Mr Hughes is cordially invited to the Department – for execution.

David Karp’s One is nothing short of brilliant: the dialogues are riveting, the issues are profound and his capacity to evoke the bleak amorality of bureaucracy is unsurpassed. This is a novel that shows us why it is worth striving for a safe, just and tolerant society. 

[ Favourite quote ] Lark was not a scientist, nor was he a mystic. Lark was something infinitely subtler, enormously wiser - part woman, part serpent, part magician, part seer, part lunatic. 

[ book info ] Karp, David: One. (Book language: English ) Penguin, New York, 1969 (1954). ISBN: 0 14 00.1459 4.