#1 THE BROKEN WORLD (8/10)
by Tim Etchells
This is the first book. It was the inspiration for this blog.
To begin to comprehend this book I need you to imagine a fucked-up life coach inadvertently giving you universal wisdom by making you play a video game which closely resembles real life…
“Some skills take a lot of training to acquire, bro”
(He’s squatting next to you in your dirty bedroom)
“You cannot just go into a store to purchase Hypnotism Skills or Extended Reason.”
You nod. Neither of you have to look at each other because you’re both staring straight at the computer screen therefore it’s quite easy to pretend that you’re not talking about either a) YOU or b) REAL LIFE—EVER. Which is pretty cosy; welcome to THE BROKEN WORLD.
I first read THE BROKEN WORLD during my first year of full-time employment at a literary agency in London, and it was the only book I could finish at the time—and though what I’d like to say is that I was feeling depressed outside of uni floundering even with a job which was meant to be so enviable but I can’t, because I’ll strike myself as seeming ungrateful but in reality, yes, I was working in books and… hardly reading them.
Except for this book that is. This was the first book I started—and finished, that sorry year, and I’m taking it off the bookshelf now because I’d lent it to two people I loved and neither of them could finish it!
“Nothing happens”, they complained.
That’s fairly true. Most of the action in this novel is conceptual. (Most of it.) Because it’s a gamer narrator walking you through what’s happening inside a game world… but since imagining what characters do in novels is already “conceptual”, I don’t see that much of a difference? Especially since it’s all being described so beautifully by a Narrator who betrays no digital prejudice… he believes in the possibility of real beauty in pixels…—and philosophical insight! Which is sooooooo endearing to me… and this all exists of course alongside all the standard action adventure stuff like suburban shopping malls full of zombies waiting to get domestically hammered… so yeah, it’s really well-balanced.
Still, I had to revisit it to see if I had remembered it at all correctly.
Here goes.
THE BROKEN WORLD by Tim Etchells
If you’re an observant reader you may notice we have two problems here already:
1. I like video games (I’m a pick-me girl)
2. I like being told what to do [through the safe distance of a book] (I’m a pick-me girl)
Anyway. That’s the clickbait out the way.
This novel is written as a walkthrough for a video game called “The Broken World”—key word here: walkthrough. It’s basically a genre, a survival tutorial for game-worlds;—and because this is an openly absurd game-world you’ll find pieces of advice like,
“Claudio will not come with the diamonds in the suitcase if you didn’t speak to Greg Nolan in the Park and collect the butterflies from him the weekend before”
And so if you’re reading this novel as a depressed person—which I think I was back then… it might strike you as a wonderful commentary on the absurd idiosyncrasies of existence, and more importantly, success.
Generally speaking again, the scope of this novel is tiny and self-involved. Strangely, this is my style: manageable worlds with repeating units…
The author of this walkthrough spends all of the time he’s not working at the pizza parlour playing this video game in his dirty bedroom… and then posting about it on an online forum. Game worlds, like novels, are necessarily contained… and I probably took the same pleasure reading this book about a guy playing a video game in his dirty bedroom as many guy-people take pleasure in playing video games in their dirty bedrooms… (video games are incredible ciphers for uncomfortable emotions—) but it’s the combination here that really works, the “unpoeticness” of the set-up eg. “go to fourth town and rescue Rachel” plus the constant bro-ing of the narrator as he @’s other users (“@Tomahawk”, “@JarHEAD”) and then of course there’s all the crystalline moments of life poetry, so unpretentiously such as, “press your head against the glass and let the world go by” which is a great piece of game-life advice for anyone, anywhere…
The Narrator also capitalises time like it’s a character or a power up. Which I love. Eg. Time swoops in or Time steals the show; emotions & states of being are also capitalised e.g. I return to this review with Second Thoughts and/or Lame Excitement…
There’s a brilliant dualism going on in this novel because there’s the video game which the Narrator is ostensibly writing about and then there’s his real life which keeps creeping in—news of his messy flat, his job at the pizza parlour, his fights with his girlfriend... and that’s real life, in the margins, peeking out...
Let’s go to my favourite level now, “The Crowded Earth”.
In The Crowded Earth level you’ll wake up in a city surrounded by tall buildings and lots of people you don’t know (do you recognise yourself yet?) and you’ll notice a billboard which says
“I DID NOT KNOW DEATH HAD UNDONE SO MANY”
To ascend this level you’ll need to find a key (classic.) And someone in the crowded earth has this key and you need to find them. Sounds kinda simple right? Wrong. Because you have no idea WHO this person is... or WHERE. So you’ve just got to calmly exist until game-world-fate decides to put them in your path. @GrinningCat says you’ve got to adopt a state of “wishless waiting” here to succeed. This is a case of “search and you will not find” but drift baby, drift, and it will come to you—which is every depressed person’s lullaby: action is not the basis of success, no fortune cookie, no! Destiny is at work here whilst I sit on this bench—but no, not quite... that is not the answer either. Someone already tried that on the forum and they confirmed it IS possible to die from frostbite and then you have to go back to the VERY beginning—in this game. PLEASE NOTE: NO RE-SPAWNS.
So, keep moving.
The best strategy for getting past this level is walking around the crowded earth as much as possible and interacting with as many people as you can.
Make connections. Follow leads.
Obviously it feels a bit unnatural since in every other level in this game you have access to magic potions and irresponsible artillery but in this level the only weapons you have at your disposal are like, Patience, and Free Floating Desire. And that’s hard. But do use those two because they will really come in handy.
So good luck.
Oh and one last thing: make sure you ALWAYS have a pen and paper handy, because you NEVER know when the key will get handed to you. And it’s going to come to you in the form of a 27-digit-code.
It could reach you in all sorts of ways.
It could get whispered to you by a drunk girl you’ve just met in the back of a rickshaw or, ringed by a sweaty bank clerk in the numbers of your bank statement—or, written in the sand by a friend you’re falling in love with against your better judgements—or, chalked by some dumbass kids on a crumbling wall at the end of a long garden in a house you just happen to be in when all hope is gone…
I hope you get the point.
I also hope you understand why I like this level so much…
Because it’s exactly how I figure strangers. Full of unearthly potential.
And it’s also a good metaphor for falling in love…
And a brilliant parody on the idea of “finding the one” 😂
I decide I DO NOT need to finish this book to remember I back it so I return it to my bookshelf unscathed.
(Although ultimately it definitely doesn’t hit as hard as the first time I read it because I am feeling a lot less lost now.)
OK. That was easy enough.
NEXT BOOK.