When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.
As Mae tours the open-plan office spaces, the towering glass dining facilities, the cozy dorms for those who spend nights at work, she is thrilled with the company’s modernity and activity. There are parties that last through the night, there are famous musicians playing on the lawn, there are athletic activities and clubs and brunches, and even an aquarium of rare fish retrieved from the Marianas Trench by the CEO.
Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in America - even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.
Irony of ironies: my review of this book will make you, the readers, go on Goodreads/Amazon (or come from Goodreads) to look it up and make comments on this book and the author, which is something that happens frequently to the main character. Also: This book reminds me of why I have covered the webcam on my laptop.
Picture George Orwell's novel 1984. You got it? Totalitarianism? Knowing everything? Take that book and add the internet/security cameras/social media and everything else about the 21st century in the online world: needing instant gratification, using screens and technology to communicate instead of one on one conversations. That is what this book is. It does get a bit soap-boxy and preachy at times, and while there are things I wish had been omitted that the character of Mae does, I think for the most part, the scenes I am thinking about are necessary to further the plot and the overall message that the book is making.
Is this book dystopian? Or is it representative of a future dystopian world, where the totalitarian regime is not a fascist ruler, but rather a computer? It's very clear that Eggers drew inspiration from 1984. As this book progresses, we see the main character Mae slowly become more and more obsessed with the online world of the Circle and how it affects her. It's very clearly an allegory of how society views social media platforms today. Most people are followers instead of leaders, which Eggers shows with the character of Mae. Mae's character begins as one you think you will root for and hope comes out on top, and she does, in a way, but not in the way that is expected, which becomes more and more abundantly clear as the novel progresses. I always like it when books and writers do that. It's always interesting to have a protagonist that you are not supposed to root for or be completely sympathetic towards. There is a great twist in the epilogue that made the book all the more satisfying. Instead of having a stereotypical villain, who wants to further the totalitarian social media/search platform until there is absolutely no privacy or secrets, which you assume is someone like Bailey, there is no real villain? It will be especially interesting to see how Emma Watson portrays Mae in the upcoming film adaptation (which I believe was also written for the screen by Dave Eggers). Also, this begs the question, if the main protagonist is unreliable, are any of the characters reliable? The scariest part of this book is that this could actually happen with the rapid pace of growth within the internet and social media. Nothing is private anymore.
I see The Circle as a cautionary tale for today's society. While technology and rapid progressions may look utopian on the surface, that surface can give away to a dystopia. It almost reminds me of Ursula K. Leguin's marvelous short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" in which very few people are able to walk away from the dystopia that is hidden in the utopian-looking world. All in all, while a bit preachy in some areas, I liked this book and think it's an important message to give, especially in a society like today. I'm going to give The Circle 4/5, and I can't wait to see how they adapt this book into a movie.
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