“Why must there always be ideas?” rages Maya, the narrator of this disturbingly exceptional novel. “Why is nothing too much to ask for?” Where Sam Byers’s previous two works have delighted in the intricacies of the modern world, minutely satirising the compromises we make – socially, politically, commercially – this one drives a singular tunnel to the heart of what it means to be a human. Maya is intent on hacking away every last vestige of civilisation until – trigger warning – she is lying happily in her own piss, shit and other assorted effluvia.
Maya’s story begins a year after her slide into homelessness. She has been selected by Green – the multinational corporation first seen in Byers’ Perfidious Albion. Motivated by the social media brownie points to be gleaned from restoring a street-sleeper to “normal life”, Green has knowingly targeted Maya, though in doing so has bitten off considerably more than this “basic highly disruptive global player” can chew. She’s given a job at a tech startup where they talk the employee empowerment talk – Byers effortlessly nails their double-speak – and know the precise value of well-publicised altruism. In reality, though, our heroine sits at a monitor all day, swiping to approve-disapprove images for web clients – images of every conceivable human depravity, solo, group or zoological.
It’s pretty clear she isn’t going to hack it. And when her employers send her off for the mandatory detox, the menu of mindfulness and meditation triggers not peace and harmony but constipation. Returning to her bedsit, in due course, she emits “a great, writhing, frothing, foul-smelling serpent of shit”. But then, still sitting on the toilet, still gripping her breakfast bread – and we’re way past trigger warnings now – she looks down at her “deep-brown cathedral” and realises she has “produced something of great beauty and significance”. Pressing the hunk of bread “into the cleft of my buttocks… I felt the prickling shards of broken crust cutting into the soft skin… I thought of all that detoxification and denial, all that panicked purity… I bit into the shit-smeared bread and swallowed it down.”
From here, Maya’s scatological trajectory can only accelerate. Having previously been friendless and unfamilied, it’s while waiting at the doctor’s (that breakfast special is not without consequences) that she observes a woman scribbling all over a magazine, writing intense, outraged criticism alongside the various self-improvement articles. Zelma, we discover, is permanently off sick and free to be a full-time street-graffiti commentator – on billboards, on bus stops, wherever airbrushed advertising makes its soul-crushing claims.
When their guerrilla bite-back campaign takes off through Instagram (for all Maya’s desire to nullify herself, she is nothing without her mobile and its apps), the two women finally realise what they want. Finding a disused, concrete-floored warehouse on an unloved industrial estate, their nasty, brutish squat is born (“Come Join Our Disease!” they post). There they live happily – and literally – in their own shit. With maggot-infested sores. And dead rat necklaces.
So, no, this is not a comfortable read. Not just because of the many effluvia-based scenes, whose immediacy is always mitigated by the narration, which, recollected in later tranquillity, is always honed and articulate, the vocabulary considered and precise. It’s more that the discomfort – the dis-ease of the title – arises directly from Maya’s own intensity, from her willingness to push herself to the total self-abnegation she craves. She blazes with all the anger of Doris Lessing’s The Good Terrorist, she has the unflinching doggedness of Minghella’s Gemma from radio play Cigarettes and Chocolate, but she wants so much less than either of them. In fact, an absolutist to the end, she wants nothing. And that, philosophically, psychologically, is the genuine achievement of this novel. Her very refusal to buy into any process or progress makes for a demanding read, but it is absolutely convincing. It is also perhaps a fitting reply to wellness, to Gwyneth’s Goop, and to, let’s face it, all that shit.
Come Join Our Disease by Sam Byers is published by Faber (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
