kluge
by Pip Adam

Available in four striking, Pop Art-neon covers, Acorn Prize Winner Pip Adam’s chameleonic new novel is deceptively universal. To say that it explores what it means to be human in a digital, late-stage capitalist world would be trite; it does explore this, but it delves with just as much curiosity into what it means to be inhuman.

The narrator tells the story of its former body, known only as the ‘Head of People and Ideas’, from 120 years or so in the future, through the superficial format of a stand-up comedy special, via the information it accesses through digital communications and any and all devices with a recording function in proximity to the narrator’s body. This is as layered and complex a reading experience as it sounds, and to add to it, the prose style is a kind of quasi-coding syntax:

‘Hello =‘Most Current Name for This Place’!’ I shout. ‘How’re you doing?’ Your job is =‘more noise’ and ‘response’. I still can’t make you out. I am =‘on stage’. You are down there or you are up there and the lights and we are not in the same entertainment venue and I am not my body.

Part of kluge‘s impact is that it reveals what is becoming increasingly sci and less -fi about our world. It is a cyber-dystopia situated right at the edge of now. Some of the novel’s more clichéd elements work in its favour in this regard: it revisits certain generic pathways for the sake of an audience who is just about entering them in reality. With everything conveyed through a digital frame of reference, all that is instinctive about the body’s responses to its external environment is refigured as mechanical function. This form of insight might be conventionally dismissed by those of us not wishing to give the digital world any more power over our lives than it already has, and yet, recognising the emotional truths beneath the narrator’s descriptions is a stimulating exercise.

The meeting goes on and on. I watch my body look at a sunset. Outside the large windows the sun sets at 7.50pm local time. It is not quite dark yet. It is sunset. The sky is red. Large clouds. Like a response to the prompt =‘beautiful sunset’. Many people’s bodies feel deep emotions when they see a sunset. Many people feel small and yet, also =‘hopeful’ in their bodies.

While the story belongs to the narrator, its centre of gravity is HIM: the despot of a giant, dying tech company. Various generic corporate figures make up ‘scrum’ (a collaborative framework commonly used by software development companies). These characters ride the shifting currents of ideology, gaining and wielding power in increasingly unhinged ways. There is a linear progression of events for the sake – as the narrator frequently reminds us – of the comedy special, and a catastrophic event in the company is isolated in the novel’s centre to create a strong sense of before and after as things descend from office politics into office politics (absurd).

It is clear my body is thinking =‘outside the box’, grabbing =‘low-hanging fruit’. My body =‘pushes the envelope’, = ‘puts a pin in it’ – going forward. Layers and layers of something meaty and illogical obscure from me what my body is hoping to gain from this conversation. It’s clear it’s opaque to me. All animals want pain to stop – reportedly. Shame, boredom, the fall from grace – reportedly – feel like =‘leopards’. The company of leopards is worse than a leopard eating your face.

The novel is packed with semi-obscured, satirically loaded references to celebrities, viral moments, Bible verses, sitcoms, and corporate clichés, which are fun to spot and earn the book its title. (A kluge is a clumsy makeshift solution to a problem, particularly a computer issue.) It is unlikely that no one reader will notice every single instance. kluge takes comedy seriously as an immediate societal issue – as a response to ignominy, as social capital, as betrayal, and as a force for connection and isolation. Adam does theology with humour by deconstructing and studying the joke from within.

I say it is a small, sideline war, but I wonder with my body if – maybe – it is the main war.

It is the main war.
=‘It is the main war’ is the =‘call-back’ that is coming, that is past, that is already here.
The =‘set-up’ for the call-back is that, for now, I just =‘wonder’. Maybe =‘wistfully’. Maybe while my body looks out a window at a =‘windswept scene’ with eyes.
‘I wonder,’ my mouth says to my body and a windswept scene, ‘if the war for laughs has been the main war all along?’

While Adam does well to meet the challenge of inhabiting the perspective of an AI, she is even bolder in imagining the perspective of a psyche which belongs to the bizarre and morally irrational class of tech billionaires. The tensions in this psyche are set up by constant narrative undermining: absolute power is undermined by extreme impotence, omniscience is undermined by surveillance blind spots, and attempts to restore one’s own dignity are undermined by the indignities done to others. Adam demonstrates the righteousness with which unchecked power justifies itself, and the small, selfish human instincts which wield disproportionate destruction on the world.

The moments of genuine human dialogue offer a refreshing contrast to the narration; they are a more accessible elucidation of the story and glimmer in the darkness of the digital syntax:

‘Do people like us?’ HE asks my body one night while we smoke out a window in HIS office so we don’t set the sprinklers off.
‘What?’ my mouth says and it laughs.
‘Nothing,’ HE says. ‘I mean, I think I’d rather be respected than liked.’
My body laughs louder. ‘Oh, they don’t like or respect us,’ my body says. My body laughs and laughs. ‘Fuck them,’ my body says, laughing and coughing a bit from the smoke and from the laughing while my body is smoking.

The relationship between the ‘Head of People and Ideas’ and HIM is perhaps more enigmatic than it should be. Whether or not such people are capable of love is largely immaterial to the stand-up comedy special, but the question looms unspoken nonetheless. Though the narrator can recount events via its unfettered technological access, the novel’s emotional thrust is largely left for the reader to infer through this prose filter.

This is how Adam demonstrates, as the blurb claims, ‘the value of a body’ as a site of emotion. Among the novel’s manifestation of the dreaded fears, frustrations and injustices we face in 2026, readers will notice that in kluge physical catharsis is visited over and over again. In her acknowledgements, Adam calls the novel a ‘scream’ – and in every sense of the word, it is.