FICTION
Johanna
Thomas-Corr
We Had to Remove This Post
by Hanna Bervoets,
translated by Emma Rault
Picador £12.99 pp144
Social media, that petri dish of
envy, falsehood, insecurity and
obsession, has become a rich
source of thriller plots over
the past five years. Indeed,
the social media mystery has
evolved with the platforms
themselves, from Laura
Marshall’s Facebook potboiler
Friend Request (2017) to Ellery
Lloyd’s Instagram thriller
People Like Her (2021).
We Had to Remove This Post
is a very different and
disturbing addition to the
canon. It’s a chilling page-
turner, narrated by Kayleigh,
formerly a “quality assurance
worker” at Hexa, a firm that
removes harmful videos and
images as they’re uploaded to
an unnamed social media site.
job. She is good at interpreting
the guidelines about which
posts must be removed. And
she finds solidarity with her
colleagues. She even falls in
love with a co-worker, Sigrid,
who seems empathetic and
dreams of becoming a
nutritionist — although she
does spend her evenings
downing canned cocktails.
But all of Kayleigh’swho absorb the worst of
humanity to facilitate this
multibillion-dollar industry?
Bervoets’s novels are often
focused on communities and
how fellow feeling can make
the worst aspects of modern
life bearable. She started out as
a journalist and this novel feels
as if it has grown out of a piece
of investigative reporting. But
the unreliable narrator gives it
a strong literary heartbeat —
and it’s richly suspenseful too.
With a few deft strokes she
manages to incorporate all of
the ills of social media into
one concise story.
The climax is utterly
haunting. Kayleigh enters
a place of trauma in a
desensitised daze, before
being shocked back into reality
and wondering: “What the hell
am I doing?” It’s a question we
could all ask ourselves as we
go about our online lives. cSixteen months after she
quit, people still ask: “So what
kind of things did you see?”
The answer: self-mutilating
teenagers, men kicking
dogs to death, child abuse,
terrorist propaganda.
The novel is the eighth
by the Dutch author Hanna
Bervoets, 38, and the first
translated into English. It
arrives lauded by Ian McEwan
and it’s not hard to see why.
It offers an update on his
own core themes: the darker
corners of human nature,
anti-scientific thinking, and
lovers who seem sane only to
prove anything but.
The narrative takes the
form of a confession written
by Kayleigh to the lawyer
representing her traumatised
former colleagues. Workers at
Hexa are required each day to
evaluate more than 500 posts
with 97 per cent accuracy. It is
extremely distressing work.
But it does pay 20 per cent
more than a standard call
centre — and Kayleigh has
credit card debt.
At first she doesn’t mind theco-workers use drink and
drugs to cope.
Sigrid has nightmares after
taking down what looked like a
fake video of a girl self-harming
only to realise that the girl
might have killed herself. One
co-worker quits, haunted by
footage of a man playing with
two dead kittens. Another gets
sucked into flat-Earth theories
and starts hanging out with
Holocaust deniers. When
Sigrid gives credence to these
conspiracies, Kayleigh no
longer knows what’s real.
Neither does the reader, who
begins to wonder if Kayleigh’s
own testimony is reliable.
We Had to Remove This Post
poses a series of questions
about the way we consume
online content. What is
normal? Who or what gets to
determine our world view?
And what is the psychic toll
on the low-wage moderatorsFICTION
Houman Barekat
The Sidekick
by Benjamin Markovits
Faber £18.99 pp368
It’s almost a decade since
Benjamin Markovits appeared
on Granta magazine’s roster of
Best of Young British Novelists
- At that point he already
had several novels to his
name, including a trilogy
about Lord Byron. He went
on to publish several more,
including the James Tait Black
prizewinning You Don’t Have
to Live Like This (2015). Long
before any of these exploits,
Markovits, who is 6ft 6in tall,
Antisocial media Low-paid
moderators pay a psychic toll
for policing internet contentEnough with drippy narrators, bring back the bad boys...
I was a social
media censor
This disturbing page-turner reveals the
dark side of the internet we don’t see
enjoyed a stint as a
professional basketball player
in Berlin; his brief career
inspired his 2010 novel, Playing
Days. He now returns to this
subject in The Sidekick, which
tells the story of an unequal
friendship between two
schoolfriends: Brian Blum, a
basketball-obsessed Jewish kid
who grows up to be a sports
journalist, and Marcus Hayes,
his prodigiously talented
African-American pal who
becomes an NBA superstar.
Drawing heavily on his own
adolescence in Austin, Texas,
Markovits’s portrayal of their
teenage years evokes a tender
nostalgia for the simple
camaraderie of youth: “The
feeling we shared, that this
was where the centre of theaction was, in the trapped
heat and dappled sunlight
under the live oak trees, on
this half-size public court, was
strong.” In alternate chapters
we fast-forward 20 years and
find our co-protagonists in
their mid-thirties: Hayes’s
powers are waning; Blum, a
lonely bachelor, is researching
a book about him. He
expounds on the finer points
of tactics and technique,
and ponders the symbiotic
relationship between sports
journalists and their subjects.
“They put balls in hoops, that’s
what they do. But we chase
them around for eight months
a year trying to persuade our
readers that it matters.”
In one telling childhood
scene, Blum triesunsuccessfully to persuade
Hayes to join a Dungeons &
Dragons role-playing game.
“I don’t understand, he said.
What don’t you understand.
Why anyone would want to
do that... Why do you want to
imagine doing stuff that you
can’t do?” The exchange neatly
encapsulates a fundamental
difference in mindset and
disposition. Indeed, a certain
thoroughgoing reticence is
Hayes’s defining trait: “Even
when he stood slouching on
the porch, in badly fitting
clothes, you felt, like, the
immanence of grace — just the
way he held himself back.”
You don’t have to be boring
to be an elite sportsperson,
but it helps — and therein lies
the problem. Wayward figuressuch as Diego Maradona are
compelling because we can
relate to their human flaws;
Hayes is more like Roger
Federer — his inscrutable
self-possession is good for
him, but no fun for us.
Meanwhile, Blum’s dull
resentment at living in his
friend’s shadow makes for a
rather meagre psychodrama.
He exemplifies a type of drippy
male narrator that is becoming
increasingly prevalent now
that horny egotists are
verboten: the ennui is bland,
the emotional temperature
consistently lukewarm. The
reader assumes the role of
beleaguered fan, watching
on despondently from the
sidelines, hoping in vain to
see a bit more fight. cWorkers have
to evaluate
500 posts
every day
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