John Boyne is not afraid of controversy. His latest novel is a rollicking and consistently funny satire featuring a family torn limb from limb by their own misadventures in social media.
Boyne himself took a battering in that arena in recent years when the publication of his novel My Brother’s Name Is Jessica led him into the highly charged area of trans politics and language. A less courageous writer might have chosen a safer subject for a subsequent novel, but Boyne chose instead to write about the very issues that, by his own admission, caused him so much grief. He might be climbing the creaking steps of a haunted house as he ventures into this territory – there are times when you gasp with fear for him, but he is nothing if not intrepid.
In The Echo Chamber, George Cleverley is a BBC TV presenter and a “national treasure”, as he repeatedly reminds us. Despite the affair he’s having with a younger woman, George genuinely believes he’s a good person, with “hard-earned Woke credentials”. But George is also a “cantankerous old dinosaur”, to quote his boss, prone to thinking and saying the most unwoke of things.
The question here is a serious one: are people defined by their intentions or their words? “Intentions no longer matter,” says George’s boss. “Social media has changed all that.”
Beverley, George’s wife – yes, Beverley Cleverley – is a successful romantic novelist who has long ago surrendered the writing of her books to a ghost. Their three grown children are Nelson, Elizabeth and Achilles, all of them lost in one way or another. Through brief prologues to each part of the book, we see the family in earlier, happier incarnations, as Boyne somewhat heavy-handedly pins the advent of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and TikTok on the timeline of their lives. It’s the only clunky element in what is otherwise a smooth ride.
Boyne is a very skilled novelist, and there’s just the right amount of push and pull to the plot, as the Cleverleys systematically go about destroying themselves with their own ubiquitous phones. Elizabeth and her ghastly boyfriend, who she refers to by his Twitter handle, are masters of virtue signalling on social media, but Elizabeth also anonymously trolls public figures, including her own father. Achilles is busy blackmailing older men he meets on dating sites, while George lands himself in hot water with a tweet that inadvertently causes offence to some members of the trans community.
With his job on the line, George passionately denies the accusations of racism, transphobia and anti-Semitism that rain down on him, but he’s fighting a losing battle. In the prevailing media landscape, it doesn’t matter if you’re a genuine racist or bigot or just someone who’s been labelled one. The sentence is the same, and that’s “cancellation”.
The characters in this novel are all drawn with a cartoonist’s skill, from George and Beverley’s belief that they were self-made, despite her inheritance and his Eton/Oxford education, to their son Nelson, who doesn’t understand why he’s so messed up because he has no dark secrets from his childhood. Elizabeth has pretensions of being a poet but her bookshelf is full of Harry Potter and Malory Towers. She misses her phone when she’s in the bath.
The only character who emerges with dignity is a 115-year-old tortoise named Ustym Karmaliuk after a Ukrainian folk hero. Even Beverley admits Ustym Karmaliuk is “the best of us all”.
One of the strong points of Boyne’s writing is that his books are generally about something. The Heart’s Invisible Furies was the largely untold story of a generation of gay men whose lives were blighted by society’s criminalisation of homosexuality. The Echo Chamber is about the perils of social media, cancel culture and the corrosive effect of mobile phones on our quality of life.
Boyne’s characters struggle to understand why it’s unacceptable to use the term “coloured” to describe a person, while it’s acceptable to say “a person of colour”, or why it’s offensive to pronounce that “All Lives Matter”. George offers a thoughtful explanation on both counts, which stands as proof of his – and perhaps also Boyne’s – good intentions.
Bestowing the name of Cleverley on the family was a big risk for a writer, because satire has to be very clever to work. Fortunately, Boyne has the sharp eye required to spear the prevailing culture right between the eyes. He never loses control even when the plot veers into theatrics towards the end, and the improbable denouement is nothing if not true to the genre.
This is satire in the vein of Evelyn Waugh’s early novels, transposed to the internet age. The Echo Chamber is extremely funny, piercingly observed and very cleverly executed. Bravo.
