Imagine a society, a high-minded psychologist tells his curmudgeonly father, ‘in which people are like cars. They have to go in for inspection once a year’ in order to assess their emotional fitness for the shared highway of life. As for the ‘psychopathic percentage’ whose ‘moral disorders’ lead them to fail this spiritual MoT, never fear: state-funded therapy will get them on the road again. And should they refuse? Surely, as we learn later in The Mark, everyone longs to stand ‘on the right side of history’.
The Nordic dream of close-knit, high-trust, mutually supportive welfare societies has always had its internal critics: mavericks, naysayers and backsliders, who prize autonomy beyond, even against, community. In this award-winning debut novel, the Icelandic poet Frida Isberg turns the enduring debate into dystopian fiction.
In a near-future Reykjavik of 24/7 AI assistance and ever-present surveillance, an ‘empathy test’ measures brain responses to videos of ‘the pain of others’. It is widely used to control access to jobs, schools and accommodation. All MPs have to pass. Now, a referendum approaches that would make the test compulsory, to prevent future crime and promote community cohesion. Already, people and organisations blessed by the mark treat failures or objectors as a suspicious underclass. The marking mandate will turn them into outcasts and social lepers.
As the looming vote polarises the nation, Isberg traces the impact of the mark on an intersecting cast of characters. Olafur, a zealous therapist, spearheads the campaign of the psychologists’ association, PSYCH, to impose the test, against the libertarian opposition led by MASC – Men Against Social Compulsion.
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