re:mote voices

Title: PopCo
Author: Scarlett Thomas
Publisher: 4th Estate

Alice Butler was head hunted by PopCo, the third biggest toy company in the world. As a specialist in creating cross words she was never quite sure why, and even though she has been with the company for two years, she doesn’t feel like she fits in. To be honest, she has pretty wilfully made an effort not to fit in. So she feels a bit weird about this weekend corporate convention that she is going to. Though it isn’t long before she has been corralled into a special group, who are going to remain in residence for 2 weeks – the elite creatives from PopCo assigned to come up with the product that will sell to teenage girls. On top of that, someone has started sending her coded messages.

Over the course of the novel we follow Alice Butler as the tries to come to terms with the ideas of branding and marketing that a company like PopCo use and how she feels about that. Interspersed with flash backs to her childhood, how she was abandoned by her father shortly after the death of her mother, to be raised by her grandparents. The kind of problems this led to at school, mixed with the interests this gave her – her grandparents having been prominent cryptoanalysts and mathematicians. Of course there are also relationships, how does she feel about her attraction to her boss, and is the involvement with Ben, who she has just met more than just sex?

PopCo is Scarlett Thomas’s sixth novel, following on from the Lily Pascale trilogy, Bright Young Things and Going Out. With her last couple of novels it could be said that she has a habit of isolating her man characters as a starting point, and building the narrative from there. In Bright Young Things a group of characters wake up on an isolated island, while in Going Out we have a character who can’t go outside. With that PopCo starts by taking Alice Butler out of her daily life, putting her on an isolated country estate and pretty much keeping her there, barring the flashbacks and rare side trips.

In a lot of ways PopCo kind of comes from the Bright Young Things model, taking all these bright young things, these cool and distinctive characters and lumping them all together so that they interact. Though while Bright Young Things worked between its multiple leads, PopCo takes a harder focus, working entirely from the point of view that is Alice Butler. Which in some ways makes this a stronger work, because we more fully get into the mind of our heroine. And Alice Butler is a great character, as both the shipwrecked child and the bright young thing she grows into.

On top of the Bright Young Thing launching point we have a certain amount of influence from William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. Alice Butler has elements of Cayce Pollard, though Thomas takes the pursuit of the No Logo idea that degree further. Also because of the background detail, and the greater sense of doubts, conflict and growth we get more of a feel for Alice as a human than just a character. The comparison isn’t just something random to be read into PopCo, the phrase “pattern recognition” comes into play once or twice early on, with William Gibson being name checked a couple of times through the narrative, to the extent where Alice is listening to a Polish pirate radio station that are mixing in reading of Neuromancer and Idoru with an eclectic sound track.

If PopCo can be said to have add dose of Pattern Recognition to Bright Young Things, it comes with comparisons to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon as well. The secret messages Alice is being sent, the code breaking toys she has created, her grandmother’s association with Alan Turing and even the flashbacks to pirates all suggest shared themes with Stephenson’s epic. Though, thankfully, Scarlett Thomas is a less wordy writer, and PopCo is a much more fun and easy going read than anything Stephenson has done recently.

Some of the math and history tangents take PopCo into heavier territory than Thomas has gone into with her previous work. I have to admit I started to feel that the Stevenson section was going on a bit long – though that was mainly because Alice was such a good character that I just wanted to get back to her story. Add to the tech background the whole “no logo” commentary and one can consider PopCo to be Scarlett Thomas’s most serious work to date. PopCo becoming something of a declaration, a manifesto.

For me, PopCo is Scarlett Thomas’s strongest work so far. Perhaps not as easily read or as much pure fun as some of her work – it took me longer to read this novel than it did the last couple of her books I read, flying through those in a day each. But there is still plenty of fun here, Thomas remains strikingly contemporary with some of the coolest characters going, she just balances it with more depth and passion in PopCo. A novel, which I hope, will allow her to get some of the attention that she deserves.