A review by flying_monkey
Qualityland by Marc-Uwe Kling

dark funny mysterious medium-paced

• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.25

Published three years ago in Germany, but only translated last year, Qualityland is a satire of our data-driven surveillance society. It's like the novel version of Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism - albeit considerably shorter than the latter doorstep-sized work. However, like Zuboff's book, and some other popular fictional works on the same theme - I'm thinking here particularly of Dave Eggers' The Circle - it's very unsubtle and in-your-face. Kling's satire is very broad and much of the plot is essentially farce. On paper some of this sounds very funny: the protagonist's journey to confront the owner of 'The Shop' (the online vendor of everything in the corporate-rebranded nation of Qualityland) is motivated by the fact that he is sent a pink dolphin vibrator, which he is assured is not a mistake but based on his profile. The lack of subtlety is most obvious in the massive info-dumping that occurs: there are pages of what is essentially précis of academic research findings on surveillance, algorithms and bias placed in the mouths of characters, particularly, 'the old man', the usual, reclusive hacker-who's-seen-it-all, who seems to be a legally mandated character in dystopian near-future novels. The surnames of characters, also rebranded to reflect father or mother's occupations, Banker, Jobless, Sex-Worker etc. is reminiscent of Max Barry's excellent, Jennifer Government, from a few years back, and the reliance on handheld devices for everything is satirised much better in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Story, which remains my favourite social media dystopia. Qualityland is fun, but it's more like a Black Mirror episode than a novel of that err, quality.