Liberation Day by George Saunders
I admit, I have never read George Saunders, which makes me some sort of short-story philistine I believe, and I love short stories. So, I am afraid I cannot compare this collection to his previous works. What I can tell you is that these nine stories are startling. They are dark, spiky, sad and imbued at times with a dark humour. They explore class, power and morality in near-future dystopias (and to be frank, some of them are current dystopias). As a reader you are never comfortable, but you are kind of complicit.
Saunders’ clever ordering of stories makes what at first seems improbable, probable. For example, we start with the title story, ‘Liberation Day’, in which some humans have given up their lives and memories to be part of a human storytelling machine. These ‘speakers’ spend their days silently pinioned to the wall of a special room in a rich family’s house. Once they are switched on, through an orchestration of tempo, pulse and other settings, they begin to tell stories to entertain said rich person and their peers. I finished the story amused and slightly disturbed, but not quite believing in the premise.
Yet, as I progressed through the book my idea of the possible shifted. He is clever, isn’t he, Saunders? By making us privy to characters’ unbridled internal monologues – whether it be the mother imagining exacting revenge on ‘some old guy’ who pushed her son, a grandfather urging his grandson to go against his best intentions, or the power dynamics of an office where Saunders effortlessly shifts between points of view – he slowly buildsa case for the improbable. Each story, to some degree, exposes human pettiness and weakness, highlighting power imbalances and the fragility of our ecosystem. I was left thinking, how irritating humans really are, but also how sad, beautiful and hopeful. The revolution is coming, but is there any hope it will succeed?
