What do you get when you cross Scientology, Apple, Facebook, and a side of Orwell? David Eggers new novel The Circle is what you get. It’s a page turning/stomach turning novel about what will happen to us if we allow the Internet to leave us as citizens with no secrets. Could we become a race of zombies going through life thinking everything we do must be splashed across the world? Eggers smartly gives us close to 500 pages of what will happen if we don’t start waking up to what the good, the bad, and ugly of the internet offers us. Privacy may be a thing of the past and are we ripe for a totalitarian regime. You may chuckle at the idea but what is laid out for us in the novel may have you thinking otherwise. I’d like to look back and see what ends up being true in 10 years. Sadly, I predict a lot of it.
Mae is the novel’s main character. A bright girl who wants to have a great future and she gets one by working for a company that seems to have it all. They care about their employees and their employees care about them. What could possibly go wrong?
It all starts to get creepy when Mae realizes that the company seems to want to know way too much about her. She wants her privacy but the company policy seems to be “Sharing is caring.” She eventually gives in until her mentor friend who helped get her get the job Anne decides that maybe too much information is not such a good thing.
We also meet a mysterious man named Kalden who throughout the novel warns her that the company is not all what it seems. It’s literally a shark tank eating the weakest in the water. The Circle is what the company wants to have closed or complete so that society can live in peace and harmony and there is no more crime or bad things happening to people. The problem is we would have to give up our total privacy to make this happen. We would all register to The Circle and then make people vote and give all info to them so they have control of it and figure out where we all are. Sounds like fun! The problem is that in the world we live in today we are kind of already there. Eggers suggests we better wake up or we will pay the price. The novel closes with a creepy hospital scene that will make you want to stay healthy forever.
As I finish this review I’m logging off the internet, turning off my computer and phone and going on to my review my next novel in good old-fashioned book form. Try and find me.
