Alex Preston

Finding his voice

His latest novel, The Parade, reviewed

The Parade, Dave Eggers’s eighth novel, is a slim, strange book, another unpredictable chapter in the career of this hard-to-pin-down author. Like his friend and sometime collaborator Jonathan Safran Foer, there’s the sense with Eggers that, after launching himself so spectacularly onto the literary scene with his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, this is an author who hasn’t quite worked out what sort of grown-up writer he wants to be. His novels feel trapped in the no-man’s-land between avant-garde experimentation and straightforward realism, and while they often contain passages of strikingly stylish prose, there’s the impression that they don’t quite hang together as a body of work, that he’s still a novelist in search of an identity.

The Parade owes a great deal to J.M. Coetzee’s masterpiece Waiting for the Barbarians. Like Coetzee, Eggers has fashioned an unnamed country, presumably (although, tellingly, not explicitly) in Africa, where the protagonist’s physical and metaphorical journey functions as a commentary on the idea of progress. Like Barbarians, The Parade has a bien-pensant central figure whose organising moral tenets are tested over the course of the story. It isn’t giving away too much of a powerfully affecting ending to say that, like the Magistrate in Coetzee’s novel, Eggers’s hero, known only as Four, ends up facing the limitations of the comforting pabulums of his world view.

Whereas the Magistrate is shocked out of his woolly progressiveness by recognising his role in a brutal totalitarian regime, Eggers’s novel questions Four’s unexamined assumptions about the benefits of capitalism and globalisation. The Parade is set in the near future and Four is the veteran operator of a hi-tech paving machine that lays pristine roadways, complete with markings. The vehicle, the RS-90, is owned by a shady multinational and has been hired out to the government of a country where a bloody civil war has recently ended.

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