So hard to be oneself

You can never know how someone else experiences the world. You can read about it, and philosophize all you like, but someone else’s actual lived experience will always be out of bounds. This is one reason we read novels: to enjoy the illusion that we can get inside another person’s head. Yet in Jesse Ball’s The Repeat Room, the primal trick of fiction is not a blessing, but a curse; not the path to empathy or understanding, but a duty and a punishment at once.

The Repeat Room opens with the garbage collector Abel Cotter among a group summoned to a courthouse for what at first seems like jury duty. As the first half of the novel unfolds, he and his fellow citizens are tested as part of a scheme sketchily described as “the NEW SOCIETY INITIATIVE”. About thirty years into the future, a system of justice has been established whereby everyone is assigned a social classification, and algorithms then predict who will commit crime. The group summoned to the courthouse undergo a series of tests to select one person to judge one specific crime. Gradually the requirements of that judgment are revealed: Abel will relive the experience of the accused, who is imprisoned in the titular repeat room, and decide whether he should be put to death.

With echoes of Franz Kafka and especially J. M. Coetzee, this is a speculative fiction with the brevity and depth of a fable, in which the details of this mysterious world remain abstract and vague: “she wore an outfit that said somehow her status was high”. Ball avoids getting bogged down in the world-building that can make some speculative fiction a chore, but this vagueness leads to another pitfall of speculative fiction. It is hard to feel anything is at stake – narratively or morally – in the novel’s approach to these questions, and in how Abel tries to answer them, in a world so unlike our own.

Something much more interesting, however, takes shape in the novel’s second half. Abel blacks out when he puts on the helmet that enables him to relive the accused’s experience. When he comes to and is about to declare his judgment, the narration switches to the first person: the accused will now tell his story. Again, in a vaguely sketched world at some remove from our own, we discover he is the son of two theatre directors who dropped out of society and brought him and his sister up on a remote “black hill”. The parents raised the children to be actors, teaching them to be “characters”.

“In character”, the children are abused by their parents; “in character”, brother and sister have sex with one another. (They have been forcibly sterilized by their parents.) Cause and effect are scrambled in this horror story: is it because they are abused that they feel it “so terribly hard to be oneself”, and so “much easier to have someone else to be”? Or is it because they have been trained to be someone else that they can be abused? Amid this shapeshifting, one thing is true – the brother loves his sister: “We were simply two parts of a thing that locked together”. Given that we know the brother has committed a crime, we are not surprised to learn that, when the sister asks him to kill her, he does (and promises to kill himself two years later).

We cannot know whether this story is what Abel experienced when he blacked out, or something he reconstructed after the fact to justify his judgement. But as the title of this novel reminds us, all storytelling is an act of repetition: the story begins when we start to recount what has happened. This is what unites the novel’s world and our own. We can never know what someone has experienced – they can only tell us after the fact, and all our decisions about guilt and innocence have to deal with that fundamental uncertainty. In the end The Repeat Room is a compelling fable about the nature of fiction, including the fiction that is memoir: about what it can and cannot tell us, and what we must decide to do with that imperfect knowledge.

Kevin Brazil is the author of Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?, 2022

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