The Every

Reviews

[This is a] remarkable piece of satire, riven as it is with horribly plausible ideas and horribly good jokes. It's one thing to sound a warning about how we are on a slippery slope to a kind of consumerist fascism where we exchange liberty for convenience. What Eggers does so well is make The Every alluring as well as alarming . . . Eight years after The Circle was published, there is all too little that rings false about its predictions about social media. If the same is true of The Every, we are in even more trouble than we thought we were. An entertainingly horrifying portrait of a civilisation meekly enslaving itself to the power of the app Eggers does us a service in underlining the sinister directions tech is taking... In its timing, The Every is right on the cryptocurrency The plot is prescient and spookily plausible, and Eggers is always entertainingly spot on in his targets Gulpable fictive entertainment . . . Eggers is a wonderful storyteller with an alert and defiant vision You read it and think: yes, this is set in the future but it is actually going on here and now. It is an urgent and necessary book. It's also fun. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar More playful and satirical than Orwell, Eggers's digital totalitarianism is a touchy-feely affair; where Orwell has the boot on the face, Eggers has online shopping and emojis. But it is no less of a serious warning . . . it scores as a series of brilliant set pieces and a devastating overall critique. Eggers proposes an uncanny world, on the border between the impossible-to-imagine and the already-in-play. Every reader is implicated. We are all members of that passive army willing to trade freedom for convenience. As digital culture blossomed, people wondered if machines could be made to think like people. The more compelling question is the one Eggers poses in The Every: Are people content to become machines? Hilarious and horrifying and idealistic. An unusual combination in a novel, or in anything else, really, but here the necessary result of a powerful writer taking on much of what matters most to our future Sparkles with provocative ideas Once a decade a book like The Every advances the frontier of literary excellence: a book that reflects our culture. Predicts our future. Worm-holes into our subconscious. Delivers artful and complex characters, metaphor, ideas, narrative. Provides percussive movements of levity, gravity, grace, suspense, hilarity." Expand reviews