Book description
The anonymous, middle-aged narrator of Perfect Tense is a man broken on
the wheel of office life - the great beige wheel of grinding routine,
the uniform grey carpets, the endless buff envelopes. Driven by the
entropy of the office, out of step with the zeitgeist, he has begun to
question his whole generation, and his own empty, under-achieved life in
particular. Recounting his day at the office - one particular day, which
seems to mimic the coffee-mug slogan, 'Today Is The First Day Of The
Rest Of Your Life' - the narrator scrutinises the arcane of his
environment like an urban anthropologist, looking for aesthetic or
spiritual purpose and finding only print-outs and suspension files,
spider plants and yuccas and polystyrene cups. In this short, brilliant
novel, we are taken on a terrifyingly familiar tour of office life which
is at once hilarious and profound - the comedy of recognition matched by
deepening urban anxiety, as if TS Eliot had been blessed with Groucho
Marx's comic timing. One man's unravelling philosophical crisis amid the
leaving parties and sandwiches becomes, in the hands of Michael
Bracewell, a metaphysical search for order and purpose deep in the back
of a desk drawer. Michael Bracewell was born in 1958. The author of
two novellas, three novels and a study of English culture. He writes
regularly for newspapers and magazines on music, art and literature.
