Scan barcode
A review by nghia
Red Plenty by Francis Spufford
2.0
I found this fictionalised history of Soviet economics circa 1960-1970, the rise and fall of the heyday of central planning, to be disappointing. It tries to do both: telling history via fictional vignettes and mostly fails at both. It doesn't help that it develops glacially slowly -- the first 80 pages are, in the book's own words, pointless and skippable.
The fictional parts are weighted by the lack of continuity -- there are essentially no recurring characters in any of the vignettes -- and the lack of any emotional weight in most of them. They have contrived conversations where characters try to explain technical details to other people. The chapter "Shadow Prices, 1960" is a prime example of this. Instead of just having a straight-forward non-fiction explanation of something, we are instead treated to a fictional academic conference where the professor explains, in implausibly simplistic terms & analogies to his highly technical audience, for the benefit of the readers.
And on the "history side", so much is carried in the introductions to each chapter -- which break the fictional form and just related history in a straightforward way, that you wonder why other parts got buried in fictional vignettes? The footnotes are nearly necessary in order to understand the history. You end up reading so much regular old non-fiction to understand things...I'm not sure how much benefit the attempts at fiction really bring to the table.
It doesn't help that this is a fairly heavily fictionalized version of things. So the footnotes will frequently say things like "I am probably anticipating the shamelessness of managerial behaviour in the later 1970s and 1980s by making Arkhipov, Mitrenko, and Kosoy be willing to countenance an actual act of sabotage." In other words, he has completely twisted history to fit his fictional narrative.
So I felt this was neither fish nor foul. It wasn't good fiction and it wasn't good history. So what is it good for?
As an aside, I found almost the entirety of the chapter "Prisoner's Dilemma, 1963" almost laughable in its naivete. I can only assume that the author has never worked middle management or a sales job in any capitalist company where this kind of goal setting negotiation/lying is standard practice. (You sandbag your estimates to HQ, they tell you achieve 120% of your estimates next quarter, you settle at 110% of your estimates, both sides feel they won and both sides know the game is being played.) Instead of shedding any light on the realities of Soviet planning it just made me feel the author has no idea how any large organization (whatever its economic system) works. The Soviet managers complain that:
But what happens to your career in the West if you miss your quarterly sales quota by a few percentage points? If a VP misses the quarterly revenue targets by a few percentage points? If a CEO missing their earnings by a few pennies? For an already slow book a throwaway chapter like this made it even harder to persevere.
That was the flourish, just for fun -- The real tale has now begun!
The fictional parts are weighted by the lack of continuity -- there are essentially no recurring characters in any of the vignettes -- and the lack of any emotional weight in most of them. They have contrived conversations where characters try to explain technical details to other people. The chapter "Shadow Prices, 1960" is a prime example of this. Instead of just having a straight-forward non-fiction explanation of something, we are instead treated to a fictional academic conference where the professor explains, in implausibly simplistic terms & analogies to his highly technical audience, for the benefit of the readers.
And on the "history side", so much is carried in the introductions to each chapter -- which break the fictional form and just related history in a straightforward way, that you wonder why other parts got buried in fictional vignettes? The footnotes are nearly necessary in order to understand the history. You end up reading so much regular old non-fiction to understand things...I'm not sure how much benefit the attempts at fiction really bring to the table.
It doesn't help that this is a fairly heavily fictionalized version of things. So the footnotes will frequently say things like "I am probably anticipating the shamelessness of managerial behaviour in the later 1970s and 1980s by making Arkhipov, Mitrenko, and Kosoy be willing to countenance an actual act of sabotage." In other words, he has completely twisted history to fit his fictional narrative.
So I felt this was neither fish nor foul. It wasn't good fiction and it wasn't good history. So what is it good for?
As an aside, I found almost the entirety of the chapter "Prisoner's Dilemma, 1963" almost laughable in its naivete. I can only assume that the author has never worked middle management or a sales job in any capitalist company where this kind of goal setting negotiation/lying is standard practice. (You sandbag your estimates to HQ, they tell you achieve 120% of your estimates next quarter, you settle at 110% of your estimates, both sides feel they won and both sides know the game is being played.) Instead of shedding any light on the realities of Soviet planning it just made me feel the author has no idea how any large organization (whatever its economic system) works. The Soviet managers complain that:
Maddening, that was the word for it: maddening that the path to career death was separated by only a few percentage points of plan fulfillment from the other one. [...] the difference to a manager between hitting 99% of the plan target and hitting 103% was not an extra 4% on th salary, but more like an extra 40%.
But what happens to your career in the West if you miss your quarterly sales quota by a few percentage points? If a VP misses the quarterly revenue targets by a few percentage points? If a CEO missing their earnings by a few pennies? For an already slow book a throwaway chapter like this made it even harder to persevere.