Book Review: Blue Friday by Mike French

It’s 2034 and the pendulum has swung so far in the direction of "family-values" that overtime is banned, anyone unmarried at 25 is assigned a spouse, and the Family Protection Agency is on the lookout for those who are working in the holidays or past the sanctioned time, sometimes with violent consequences. On the flipside of this is Leviticus, leader of the Overtime Underground Network, encouraging and enabling those who love their jobs and want to work just a bit longer than 9-5. Mike French’s Blue Friday is a science fiction that draws on George Orwell’s 1984 to show a society gone mad. Though written in a light-hearted farcical way, the novel takes a hard look at state sanctioned control and the way in which it perverts even the most humanistic of subjects (such as work-life balance and “family values”).

Blue Friday vacillates between black humour, which can be very funny indeed, and the cognitive dissonance of an unlikely dystopia which is all too familiar. The story walks a fine line between deep psychology and light-hearted farce, especially the episodes with the Mr Men styled Mr Brittle and Mr Stone, as well as the prevalence of old-fashioned state-sanctioned television shows like “Bewitched” and “The Generation Game”.

As with French’s first novel The Ascent of Issac Stewart, Old Testament references abound in Blue Friday. The main protagonist is Leviticus, aka Trent, who, after killing the previous Leviticus, goes into hiding with his girlfriend Keturah, attempting to continue his “workaholism is freedom” crusade against the state. Driving Leviticus' actions is Covenant, a bodiless, ubiquitous flirty computer. As the tension between Keturah and Covenant grows, we begin to wonder just who Covenant is, and where the story will end. The overall effect of this strange dance between humans and computers, especially as it manifests itself in Trent's psyche, is chilling.

Article Author: Maggie Ball

Magdalena Ball runs The Compulsive Reader. She is the author of the novels Black Cow and Sleep Before Evening, the poetry books Repulsion Thrust and Quark Soup, a nonfiction book The Art of Assessment, and, in collaboration with Carolyn Howard-Johnson, …

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