Success by Una Lucy SilberradMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Not a complete pig-in-a-poke novel; I had already read this author's The Good Comrade , so I knew she wrote well and that I'd be getting something that wasn't standard or expected, but I didn't have much idea what that would be. I just picked it up off the Project Gutenberg feed.
It's not in any particular genre, and it undermines the tropes of the one genre you might think it was in ((view spoiler)). But it's thought-provoking, and well worth a read.
The central character is an engineer named Michael Annarly, a brilliant man, but hard to work with because he doesn't care much what people think of him, or try to spare their feelings if he thinks they're not doing good work, and he demands special conditions that most employees wouldn't be given, in order to do his best work. When he tells his employers that he's finally finished a design for them for an "aerial torpedo" (what we would call an air-to-air missile - this is very early 20th century, and airship warfare is what's in view), something they've been wanting to get from him for a while, they almost immediately contrive an excuse to fire him. There's a good deal of hypocrisy, unfairness and outright unethical practice involved, something that becomes clearer as the story progresses.
They're an important firm, and having been fired by them for reasons that are not publicly announced, but are rumoured to have to do with his lack of professional ethics (when in fact it was theirs), he's left in a position where he probably can't get a similar job with anyone else.
Fortunately, when he's in London to plead (unsuccessfully) with one of the firm's directors, his cousin Nan sees him walking the streets, looking devastated, and kindly invites him home, where he tells her what's happened. She arranges for her father, who sells antique furniture, to give him some technical drawing work, drawing chair backs and the like for restoration and other purposes - work well below his level, but something. The two become friends, more like siblings than cousins, and in many ways it's that relationship, more than any specific work that he does, that helps Michael hang on. Nan is a quiet woman, the sort that most people overlook, and yet her intervention and her continuing support of Michael are key to the book. She also has a lot more skill than people credit her with.
It's a wonderfully humane book, full of quotable bits about engineering as well as about life. Michael is, essentially, a brilliant problem-solver, so he can go into any context where there's a technical problem to solve and figure out what's going wrong and how to fix it. At one point, though, he's brought in to do some consulting and tells his client that he can't fix the problem - it's not the machinery, it's the people. Partly through his experience, and partly through Nan, he comes to have a much better understanding of the human side of work, and is never in danger of repeating his previous mistakes.
There are some aspects of the book that fell short for me. There's a clumsily obvious foil character for Michael, the brother of a man who works for Nan's father, who, like Michael, came up with an invention that would make his employer a lot of money, and who asked for a proportionate reward. When he was given five pounds, he tore it up, threw it in his boss's face, resigned, and has now spent years working on a better invention to make the previous one worthless, as revenge. He's bitter and miserable and makes the people around him miserable too.
Then there's the moment where Nan is calling for divine judgement on the company that fired Michael just at the moment when a process he developed for them goes disastrously wrong in a way that wouldn't have happened if he'd been there, costing the directors a lot of money. (Both characters happen to be in a location close enough to the plant to hear the bang and see the flame go up just as Nan is, uncharacteristically, ranting.) It struck me as, again, too obvious.
Most of the book is not like that, though. In fact, if anything it has the opposite fault; things just happen that don't obviously contribute to the overall thrust of the book, like the extended sequence around Michael's sister's wedding, the main upshot of which is to allow Nan to meet someone who plays a relatively minor role later on. Though, thinking about it, the wedding is probably also there to highlight the conventional expectations and values of Michael's family, in contrast to how his life works out.
It's not at all a tight plot, and, with the exception of those couple of clumsy moments, it doesn't point up the theme too strongly either, which is a strength more than it's a weakness. The title, "Success," is, in a way, the theme of the book; Michael learns, as Nan already knew, that the conventional markers of success don't really matter - money, fame, marriage, recognition by your employer or by others that you've helped, like the city council whose power station Michael helps to rescue from complete disaster because he happened to be doing a consulting job next door when it failed. What matters is that you're doing good work and that there's someone who understands you; that's success. The comeuppance that is finally served to the nefarious firm and the director most responsible for Michael's dilemma is almost extraneous.
I enjoy books that are not conventional, that are quite unlike anything else, and this is one. It also has a good deal to say about topics I'm interested in: the failures and injustices built into the way work is organized, the meaning of success, the process of solving hard problems, and the importance of human connection and kindness in the world. For me, despite a couple of weaker moments, it was indeed a success.
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