In Kay’s intriguing novel,a weak, manipulative protagonist develops a self-induced passion while transcribing phone-tapping tapesIt’s 1981, or the era of Margaret Thatcher and the cold war,IRA bomb attacks and race riots. Theres a royal wedding and Brideshead Revisited is being serialised on TV. In Francesca Kay’s intriguing novel approximately state surveillance, it is business as normal at the Ministry of Defence’s Institute, and where a roomful of listeners transcribe phone-tapping tapes. But is there a mole at work?The chronicle opens in the banal quiet of “the long room”,where eight assiduous listeners sit wearing headphones at desks “islanded in lamplight” behind blind windows. The reader listens in to the thoughts and feelings of Stephen as he eavesdrops on the intimate lives of people he will never be permitted to meet face to face. The conversations he records are mundane. The suspected enemies of the state codenamed ODIN, VULCAN – tend to be aged communists, or harmless and decrepit,afflicted with a loneliness nearly as deep as that of Stephen himself as he records in longhand, “in flowing cursive, or with the pen his mother gave him when he was still at school”. For these listeners are also writers,teasing out possible tacit meanings, “interpreters of silence”. The Long Room can be read as a parable of the fiction writer’s and reader’s project.
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Source: theguardian.com