PopCo is a 500-page novel
about the excesses of multinational corporations, the exploitation of children
through commercialism, the mistreatment of animals in factory farming, and the
ways in which creativity becomes twisted by the need to sell products.  Yet it
is also amazingly engaging, fun, and spontaneous, and is one of the most
enjoyable novels I have read for months.  Scarlett Thomas manages this by
making codes and mysteries integral to the plot, and by making her lead
character Alice quirky and vibrant.  She works for PopCo, which is the third
largest toy manufacturer in the world.  Her job is to create games or toys that
use codes or detective abilities.  She feels ambivalent about what she does,
but also not confident that she will keep her job.  Previously, her income came
from making crosswords, and she now has become used to a good income.  She has
a best friend at PopCo, Dan, with whom she shares private jokes.  She is
comfortable with much of her lifestyle and she might possibly be promoted.  So
she is potentially at a turning point in her life. 

The novel starts out with Alice taking an overnight train to go to the PopCo "Thought Camp" held at a
large country house in Devon, UK.  People will gather there to try to come up
with ideas for new toys, but the company’s policy in bringing them together in
this different venue is to make them think differently, be more creative, and
get out of their usual ruts.  So they play games together — sports and more
intellectual games like Go — and start to get to know each other better.  They
are led by the company founder Mac and his second-in-command Georges.  Alice has had a flirtation with Georges and she wonders whether it might lead to something
more here on this retreat.  She also meets a co-worker called Ben with whom she
has a chemical reaction, and she isn’t sure where that encounter is heading. 
As the story proceeds, we learn more about Alice’s childhood and how she became
introduced into puzzle solving by her grandfather.   She had an unusual
upbringing, and this accounts for her slightly different perspective on life. 

As the retreat goes on, and the
workers are encouraged to come up with ideas for products that will appeal to
teen girls, Alice thinks about her own experience at school, as she was teased
and ostracized, and how she eventually came to be comfortable without wanting
the approval of her peers.  Spicing up the plot, Alice gets some secret
messages, and we learn how some codes are made, as she tries to decode them. 
This brings in surprisingly technical bits of mathematics, but Thomas manages
to do this without making it seem like she is quoting a textbook.  You do not
need to be a puzzle-solver yourself to get drawn into the mystery of who is
sending Alice these notes, and it is still possible to be impressed by the
cleverness of the codes even if you do not try to solve them yourself. 

The narrative shifts between past
and present, gradually building up our understanding of Alice, as she comes to
an important decision about what to do with her life.  We also come to learn
about marketing strategies and the psychology and sociology of teen
consumerism, and the ways in which Alice is both good at doing her job and yet
at the same time repelled by what she is doing.  Thomas brings the reader round
to what she explains is basically her own view, that we should become
revolutionaries and fight the insidious ways in which our lives are being taken
over by consumerism.  Furthermore, she makes the arguments that we should
become informed about the exploitation of people in the third world and the
inhumane ways that animals are treated in modern farming.  Normally, such a
political book would be didactic and probably tiresome, yet Thomas keeps the
pace fast and her characters interesting.  Impressive.

Link: Scarlett Thomas website

© 2006 Christian Perring. All
rights reserved.

Christian
Perring, Ph.D., is Academic Chair of the Arts & Humanities
Division and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Dowling College, Long Island. He is also editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews.  His main
research is on philosophical issues in medicine, psychiatry and psychology.

Categories: Fiction