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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #356262 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Science fiction is an unhelpful label but a useful genre. Liz Jensen's third novel, The Paper Eater, is undeniably SF. It has an artificial landmass; a computer that runs the entire country--Atlantica--but is only "the size of a home refrigerator"; and a social landscape in which new management and consumer languages are developed. With all the trappings of SF, this novel is at heart a damning and wild satire of consumerism run riot.

On Atlantica, the artificial island that has based its success on accepting any and all waste from all over the world, everyone is a consumer. Libertycare, with its monolithic Head Office and automated Hotline Consumer Controls runs everything, keeping the customer happy no matter what:

"What Libertycare has done ... is to stop randomness in its tracks, by imposing a system of fairness that's respected worldwide ... The life of a typical Atlantican customer is not a string of random events. It is an incentive scheme in action..."

Harvey Kidd and Hannah Park are both emotionally stunted victims of "the death of politics" and, along with a strong cast of real and unreal characters, are manoeuvred by projected consumer trends and the wily, artificially sexy Facilitator General into becoming scapegoats for the system. However people, as Harvey observes, can sometimes win by being stupid. As the appearance of Utopia starts to fade, criminals and even geology itself return to haunt the terrible Paradise. --John Shire

The Times, 16th June 2001
'A novel that attacks modern life with wit and, perversley, a real joie de vivre.'

Synopsis
Meet Hannah Park, slave to the democracy machine, and Harvey Kidd, the man the system spat out. Atlantica, a world of compulsive consumption, fervent Utopianism, emotional discovery, and love on the rocks. Torn from his family, exiled from his native island of Atlantica, and imprisoned on the former Disney ship Sea Hero, one-time computer whiz Harvey Nash has found solace in the voodoo art of papier-mache. But as the execution date of his violent cellmate approaches, he is confronted with daily reminders of the wrongful sentence meted out to him by the consumer-dedicated system he once voted for. Is it too late for vengeance of Libertycare's Facilitator General, and the machine known as the Boss? Was the disappearance of the woman Harvey loved a tragic accident or something more sinister? And is the notorious Sect really so dangerous that only erasure of civil liberties can contain it? In a witty, satirical vision of the future worthy of Orwell or Huxley, Jensen evokes a world of rampant consumerism, blind obedience, virtual love and home-chewed papier-mache.

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Customer Reviews

Rhino Poo???
I loved this book! I have read a number of other Liz Jensen novels and found them all to have intricate story-lines and well thought out plots. This is no different. Indeed, in some ways - characterisation in particular - there might be too many similarities.

The one single thing I didn't "get" about the novel was the rhino poo reference. If anyone wants to help me out here, I'd appreciate it!

A warning shot across the bows of our future
'If there's one thing to be said about life in captivity, it's that you get to travel.' Harvey Kidd is imprisoned in a floating jail which is heading back to his homeland, Atlantica, an artificial island ruled by a computer system called 'Liberty' which calculates the greatest happiness of the greatest number, readjusts 'marginal' people, and controls a consumer society pushed to the limits where choice is illusory.

Harvey Kidd is a 'damaged' orphan, and we follow his story and his imaginary family, and then his fragile relationship with another frail personality, Hannah, who believes she has a 'block' which prevents her from socialising. Jensen renders this relationship beautifully, along with a twisting plot and the underpinning surreal parable of consumerism and 'people's choice' rhetoric. A warning shot across the bows of our future.

a wild, witty, scary read
I thought this was a terrific book. Liz Jensen seems to have a style like no-one else's, and the ability to hook you into the story, which is a dark dystopian fable about consumerism gone mad. I never quite knew where it was going, but it didn't seem to matter - and I certainly ended up far from anywhere I knew. I don't know many writers who can do that.