Writing as Catherine Webb (her actual name) interesting story, timeline a little confusing (intentionally?) her writing style gets distracting ( )

Neither an easy or a cheerful read, Claire North's 84K is a dystopian thriller set in a near-future England which has surrendered itself entirely to the attractions of business. In a Faustian pact, the Government has handed over all its functions to The Company, and given it a free hand in how it carries those functions out. The Company collects taxes, and hands back to Government what it sees fit. Citizens are judged by how much they are fiscally worth and how much insurance they carry. Any crime can be bought off, if you have the money or the insurance cover. Victimhood is assessed on the victim's worth to society; so murder may attract an indemnity of hundreds of thousands of pounds - or a lesser sum, like the £84,000 of the title. If your cover is good enough, of course, you can meet that indemnity easily. But if you're poorer, then incurring an indemnity for some minor or petty infringement could break you. Imagine that you were suddenly landed with a bill for, say, £7,500 out of nowhere. People on moderate incomes might struggle to meet that; people with low or no income would find it beyond them, and so the alternative - indentured servitude, or 'the patty line' - is imposed.

By the time of this novel, the system is well entrenched, and opposition to it appears both pointless and ineffective. Our protagonist - let's call him "Theo Miller" - had humble origins but now works in the Criminal Audit Office, assessing the value of lives taken or indemnities due. But when a childhood friend is murdered, and her £84,000 indemnity is paid by a corporate assassin almost out of petty cash, Miller feels obliged for a number of reasons to follow up the case, even when his superiors disapprove.

The story is told in multiple timelines and in a stream of consciousness style which can be unsettling, as most of the characters don't have well-formed consciousnesses to begin with and never seem to be able to complete a train of thought. We are stuck with the awful reality of a (vey well-realised) society which allows the 1% all the luxuries they could want, at the expense of making the 99% live in a dystopia. "Theo Miller" moves uneasily through this world - he is a well-drawn but ineffective character - until about two-thirds of the way through when the tone of the novel changes abruptly and instead of moving amongst the 99%, we are dealing with the 1%. The non-linear narrative adds another dimension and keeps the reader alert as the pieces fall into place.

About half-way through this book, I considered what I had learned about the society we were being shown. The "patty line" - which started out preparing burgers for fast food, but has since expanded to cover any menial labour that supports the economy - provides the basis for all of society. Those on the patty line cannot get off, as they never earn enough to repay their indemnity. They can be bought and sold, so the indentured servitude is actually slavery. And slaves are dispensable - either thrown out when they become too expensive to employ, or discarded if they fall victim to one of the many failures of (non-existent) health and safety rules - because such things were dropped by The Company long ago as being uneconomic. Everybody knows that this is the case, but no-one takes any notice and conveniently brushes it under the carpet

So - a society whose economic activity is built on disposable slave labour, and whose citizens know but look the other way. The parallels to Nazi Germany are unmistakeable. Yet the ghastly corporatism was arrived at through high-placed individuals feathering their own nests at the expense of everyone else. 84K should be widely read, because there are those who would see it as a utopia rather than a dystopia, who would see in the attitudes of the 1% values that they would consider admirable. The rest of us should read this book, and take its lessons, especially as to the ease that the slippery slope can offer. The style of the novel may put some off - it is not straightforward - but the picture is too important to ignore. ( )

https://fromtheheartofeurope.eu/84k-by-claire-north/

I’m a big fan of Claire North’s work anyway, but this is a bit different – a well-realised near-future dystopian England, where crime and social transgression have been transformed into accounting units (along with the privatisation of most public services) and the underclass is oppressed by cosy collusion between big business and government. Our protagonist, a minor cog in the bureaucracy of punitive taxation, is moved by a shadow from his own past to begin fighting back against the system. A couple of interlocking plot lines, so that you can look at the story from slightly different angles. Grim but convincing. ( )

This was a DNF for me. Multiple starts and I just can't.

I love or like many of her other books but for some reason found this impossible. The opening seemed to be a series of false starts that weren't going anywhere and eventually I lost patience.

I won't give a star rating since I didn't finish.

I should have liked this. THe concept is great and there's a lot of good world building. I don't mind the choppy writing that much, and I like overlapping timelines. But it felt a little sluggish, and the ending was a little too much "I don't know quite where to take this so let's take a common dystopian ending." ( )