Book review: Granta109: Work

Published on Sunday 24 January 2010 10:51

GRANTA 109: WORK Edited by John Freeman Granta Books, £10.99

ONE of several gems in this work-themed edition of Granta is a short essay by Steven Hall, What I Think About When I Think About Robots, in which he meets some of today's foremost AI experts, and – more importantly – some of their creations. Notable among these are TANK, which works as a receptionist at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, and HERB, an autonomous machine which has the capacity to absorb information from the world around it. HERB's creator can foresee a time when it might start Googling for information; even a time when it might start offering other (human) internet users hard cash for answers to its questions.

Two robots then: one an employee, the other a potential employer. By rights we should be delighted by these signs that a modernist utopia where robots do all the work while we kick back might be just around the corner. Yet some 21st-century humans may find the concept of robot labour unsettling. Why? Because, for better or worse, we increasingly define ourselves by what we do.

This merging of occupation and identity crops up all over Granta 109. In Looking For The Rozziner, Colum McCann recalls a childhood visit to his father's place of work, the now-defunct Evening Press in Dublin. Noting the difference between the journalists and the men working on the printing presses, he writes: "The news of the day to a boy nine years old was… how very different men could be, and how people seemed to have their own little corner, and every corner was a world."

Elsewhere, two more childhood reminiscences demonstrate how work can confer identity not just on a worker but also on his or her family. In Secrets Of The Trade, Yiyun Li describes how her father's job as a nuclear scientist for the Chinese government meant living in a claustrophobic compound populated by the families of other nuclear scientists. Peter Stothard's Essex Clay, meanwhile, conjures up a community of radar technicians living in a soulless housing estate outside Chelmsford. Stothard pokes fun at the spirit-crushing sameness of it all but he's also good at bringing out the ways people tried to assert their individuality in the face of uniform architecture and employment.

The most chilling examination of the occupation-identity link here is Martin Kimani's The Work Of War, in which he tries to understand the brutal efficiency of the Rwandan genocide. Kimani finds that many Hutus referred to the murder of Tutsis as "work", and they used their everyday work tools – machetes – to carry out the slaughter. The killers found a sense of belonging in this labour too. As one interviewee says: "Suddenly Hutus of every kind were patriotic brothers… We were doing a job to order."

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 24 January, 2010