A Son of the Rock

Harper Perennial, 2008, 247 p

I zoomed through this even though the book could be subtitled “A Short History Of Fads And Crazes.” Each chapter begins with a description of some historical fashion or trend – hula hoops, tattoos, chain letters, coonskin caps, angel food cake, etc – which Willis must have had fun researching. (Or not.)

Our narrator, Sandra Foster, is interested in such crazes since she is trying to find out why they start as part of her work at HiTek, an interdisciplinary scientific enterprise with various projects on the go and whose administration is keen for one of these to win a prestigious Niebnitz Grant. The HiTek environment allows Willis to satirise the systems, management initiatives and staff interactions of large workplaces. This is an easy target, of course, but in the mix we also have discursions on the nature of scientific discovery as related to the roles of serendipity, chaos and distraction.

At HiTek all are lumbered with an admin assistant from Hell – a woman known as Flip, who loses papers, delivers mail to the wrong people and generally stirs things up. Through Flip’s incompetence Foster encounters the biologist, Dr O’Reilly, who wishes to study information diffusion patterns in macaques but is having trouble with the paperwork for his funding. Both he and Foster are hampered in their subsequent endeavours by the “never there when you want her but always when you don’t” Flip who is also annoyingly in the forefront of the latest “thing” whatever that might happen to be; anti-smoking initiatives, unusual accessories, pointless facial adornments etc.

To help O’Reilly, Foster arranges for a farmer friend of hers to deliver (instead of monkeys) sheep but it is not till they realise the flock’s bellwether is missing and have it delivered that the project shows signs of success.

There are opportunities in among all this comedy stuff for Willis to contrast the human urge for conformity vis-a-vis fads with herd instinct in animals.

Some order is eventually brought to proceedings when Flip gains an assistant who is surprisingly efficient and the plot’s strands are all tied together successfully.

Where in all this is the Science Fiction, you may ask? Well, it is set in a scientific research establishment and it is unlikely a mainstream story, even a mainstream comic novel, would treat the subject of crazes in the way it is done here.

While Bellwether is a light read (despite some philosophical underpinnings) it is also reasonably entertaining. Willis is able to get you turning the pages. Sometimes it’s great to get through a book in a short time.