Guy Standing’s 2011 book, The Precariat, made headlines by identifying what he called “a new dangerous class”. Marx had had the proletariat; now the most important class in the modern economy was, Standing argued, the precariat, the millions of people working in short-term, casual, precarious jobs. It was a brilliant term, and a powerful piece of analysis. It was relevant around the world, and here in New Zealand, where we know that at least 30% of the workforce, and probably more like 40%, are in this kind of precarious work. As elsewhere, the work they do can be deeply damaging to their lives, and they are increasingly denied rights and privileges afforded to other citizens. (In fact, Standing argues, they are less and less ‘citizens’, and more and more ‘denizens’, people who live somewhere but do not have the rights of its citizens.)

The Precariat Charter, Standing’s follow-up, tries to chart a path to the future, one in which precarious work is abolished and the people who do it regain their full status as citizens. It is a noble aim; it’s just shame he makes such a terrible hash of the attempt.

Standing’s Charter has 29 articles, and it’s there that the problems begin. With so much ground to cover, every subject is, inevitably, dealt with in a brief and very sweeping manner. It doesn’t help that the book, as the author acknowledges, “does not reproduce many statistics” but is designed to increase empathy and prompt people to “reach out” to the precarious. On the one hand, the lack of statistics makes a lot of its claims difficult to accept. On the other, Standing’s tone and high-handed manner are exactly calculated not to increase empathy with anyone.

The Precariat Charter is a very black-and-white book, filled with things that “must” be done and people who “must understand” this, that or the other. Anyone who doesn’t like, for instance, a universal basic income has only a very tenuous hold on their “progressive credentials”, apparently. And the prose doesn’t help Standing’s cause. Perhaps the worst sentence, though it is by no means exceptional, is the one where he lays into Third-Way Labour parties’ “Faustian bargain” with global capital, declaring: “Like all Faustian bargains, the orgy had to end.”

There are some interesting ideas in the book, such as a proposal for giving every citizen a certain amount of money to spend on national election campaigns through the party of their choice, or organising a national ‘deliberation day’ to be held two weeks before a general election and devoted to public debate. There are some worthwhile challenges, too. Standing makes a good point that every new social problem finds its solution not in old institutions and organisations, but in the new ones that arise as part of the struggle. This presents an interesting question for trade unions, and others, as to what kind of institutions are needed to help those in precarious work. Unfortunately, as is generally the case, Standing is far better at diagnosing the problem than providing a sensible or helpful solution.

In the Philippines, the word ‘Ilustrado’ refers to a class of native intellectuals who were nurtured by but then revolted against their Spanish colonial masters. It’s a fitting title, then, for Miguel Syjuco’s novel, which is both a dissection of his native land’s strengths and failings and an exploration of one man’s attempt to redeem the mistakes of his life.

Ilustrado‘s narrator is an aspiring author, also called Miguel Syjuco, who returns to the Philippines after the death of his mentor, Crispin Salvador, a fellow Filipino writer-in-exile. Embellishing a first-person narrative with invented blog posts, news reports, biography and autobiography, Syjuco paints a picture of an exuberant but deeply corrupt country, proud of its history but unsure of its place in the world.

Syjuco delights in lampooning Filipino politics, but satire is a difficult weapon to control, and here it has the effect of distancing the reader, making it harder for us to imagine the cartoon-ish political intriguing as a backdrop for the other, more personal, narratives. It’s fortunate, then, that they are welded together at a deeper level, as the story of how Miguel (and, ultimately, Crispin) try to heal past hurts becomes metaphorically the story of the Philippines’ attempts to forge a better future.

Some humility, an acceptance of personal mistakes, Syjuco suggests, are vital in this quest. But so too is a sense of rootedness, a heartfelt feeling for (and again, an acceptance of) one’s own nation as a far from perfect but still loveable homeland.

In less capable hands, self-referential, multi-layered narratives can irritate and distract, but Syjuco proves their worth with a finale that transmutes the novel’s many strands into a magical, dreamlike whole. Fusing a cynical sense of humour with an original take on the universal struggle for salvation, he vindicates the idea that individuals and nations alike can, whatever their faults, become once again illustrious.

First published in Time Out

Having had great success with one animal fable, 2003’s Booker Prize-winning, seven million-selling Life of Pi, Yann Martel has gone one better: an animal fable in the shape of a play within a play.

Beatrice and Virgil is the story of Henry, a novelist who believes that more “poetic license” should be taken with the Holocaust. Conveniently enough, he meets a strange taxidermist also named Henry, who has written a play – featuring a donkey, Beatrice, and a howler monkey, Virgil – that tackles precisely that subject.

Martel is principally interested in how we can talk about something like the Holocaust: is it possible for such awfulness to be represented? Is art the right way to bear witness? Hence Virgil and Beatrice’s story initially reads something like Waiting for Godot, always striving to express ideas just beyond expression, but then becomes something much darker as the full horror is revealed.

Martel’s problem is that his human characters seem flat and lifeless compared to the animals in which he excels. And much of the fable’s imagery, and hence the whole book, is clunkingly obvious – and is then carefully explained for the reader anyway.

Even if this simplicity is the point – that directness and honesty are in the end the only valid response to true evil – reading Beatrice and Virgil remains a grating way to pass a few hours. Nor does Martel really demonstrate that a Beckett-style fable of a donkey and a monkey can capture the true brutality of great evil.

Individually, Virgil and Beatrice are deeply affecting creations, pathetic in every sense, but the novel surrounding them is less than the sum of its parts. Martel may need to master more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak.

 First published in Time Out

Why are we so obsessed with making lists? It is this question that Umberto Eco, the philosopher, medievalist and writer best-known for ‘The Name of the Rose’, sets out to answer in his latest piece of non-fiction.

The result is a dazzling, sometimes dizzying, tour through two millennia of tables, lists and categories, supported by dozens of examples from literature and real life, and lavishly illustrated with art that draws on the power of lists (think Breughel’s densely populated townscapes, or Bosch’s chaotic visions of hell).

The examples Eco cites can be comic, as in Rabelais’s setting out of dozens of materials with which to wipe one’s backside (the neck of a goose being the best, apparently); or serious, as when the minutely detailed listing of a nineteenth-century abattoir’s inner workings well conveys their panic, chaos and cruelty.

Eco’s point is that lists do not always impose order on the world, as we might think. Just as often, they perversely emphasise, through their very limitedness, the almost unimaginable vastness of everything outside their field, the huge scope of life. They can also express delight in abundance, exuberance or excess.

But this insight is never properly developed, partly because ‘The Infinity of Lists’ is more a beautifully illustrated essay than a full-length book, and partly because Eco often revels in the richness of his lists rather than dig deeper into them. The overall impression is of a brilliant mind amusing itself, of scintillation rather than penetration – of, ultimately, a great deal of learning being used to produce a very superior coffee table book.

First published in Time Out