Workplaces and life settings can often be characterized by static, particular moods. At times, these moods can be disrupted by outbursts that disturb all acclimated to norms. Some grow irritated, wanting to silence the foreign phenomena as quickly as possible. Disturbance can bring intense, unwanted change.
B is the first-person lead of Babak Lakghomi’s new novel South. Apart from his marriage, B’s world is open-ended, instability ever-looming. B works as a freelance writer, and so largely lacks a setting to commit habits in to the point of comfort. His most recent writing assignment flounders, unpublished; the activism-centric angle on contemporary ornithology is discouraged by his publisher in favor of flat, technical writing on a specific species. This repression is the start of a pattern in the novel of advantaged types (editors, administrators, bosses) wanting their workers to keep politics out of work, much like real life.
Financial instability sends B south through desert lands for new reportage. Where the land meets sea, a helicopter takes him to an oil rig far out on the water. We’re flown into South‘s meat; its primary, torturous, bottomless pit of inaction.
What’s expected of B onboard is unclear, but one thing is definite: under no circumstances should he be covering the whispers of worker’s rights issues and their accompanying outbursts/demonstrations. The rig is hardly, if at all profitable. There’s an undercurrent of dissatisfaction, ennui, jaded attitudes towards the futility of the declining operation. There’s a possible ending to several careers. Some of these people living and working out at sea grow wild with agitation:
… the pay was delayed. There were suicides. One of the workers hanged himself from his bunk bed. The cleaning lady found his body in the cabin. Another cut his wrist in the shower. Some union members have disappeared after.
Dissidence is silenced and done away with, however mild or intense the sentiments. No one’s looking for tangible solutions to their existential/exploited labor issues, they just wallow.
From the start of his stay, B is branded as the press’s potential exposure of the oil rig’s unethical practices and thus, the potential jeopardization of their already tenuous jobs. He’s shut out, regarded with suspicion, if not outright hostility from most due to his outsider status. A lot of procedural information about the oil rig is left unexplained.
The notion of the assignment without parameters or gatherable material grows by the paragraph. Lakghomi’s clipped prose leaves the largely internal dialogue taut with unspoken anxieties. Much is left unsaid, especially to us. The varying degrees of silence are of concern to all living in and consuming the text. Like Lakghomi’s earlier novella Floating Notes, South parades in mystery, muted despair, sinister obscurities. The language gives you the sparsest details to latch onto, and there’s an ever-rising sense of despondency and danger.
South is inevitably Kafkaesque with its bureaucratic procrastinations and deferrals that confuse and exasperate in expanding degrees. As in The Trial, workers passing in the halls want nothing to do with our narrator’s mess of problems. He’s ignored, deferred, put off. Though exaggerated to an intense point, the gradual, hardline alienation is a believable reaction to labor rights agitators in a workplace. The distrust, the suspicion, the ostracizing.
While all this discourse around fairness and transparency/obfuscation in the work/lifeplace is happening, B’s personal and literary life undergoes a series of increasingly distressing changes. Communication with his wife dwindles into nonexistence. Whether or not his messages to her and his editors are left unsent is unclear. A book he’s written on his father’s experience as a labor organizer is sent back to him wildly edited, so much that it hardly resembles the original project:
In the next chapter he’d sent me, he hadn’t used a red pen for his edits. My meaning had been dissolved into whatever he’s added. I no longer recognized the words. This time, there were not even any photos of my father.
The forced changes are political, and B’s left powerless around the publication of his manuscript. Blotted-out details grow hazy in a mind that loses tangible proof of its past. A series of manipulations lead to deeply gaslit narratives that swirl the back half of South in uncertainty. The disorientation is run through a series of undefined periods willingly/unwillingly spent in various cabins and cells.
The author inserts various texts into the book like B’s emails, his personal notes, notes from people on the rig, his father’s journals, and a mysterious Book of Wind. This last one takes us by the collar and blows us about, showing the serious effects the sinister, mystical book has on the narrator. As mentioned, the latter parts of South really push past expectations set up early on, with unsettling results.
Quick if you want it to be, slow if you want it to be, South is a muted industrial thriller with mystic bits splashed throughout. Babak Lakghomi has taken the quick, minimal aspects of his early novella and extended them into another enigmatic, unnerving hypothetical.
South, by Babak Lakghomi. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Rare Machines, August 2023. 200 pages. $17.99, paper.
Corey Qureshi is a writer and musician based in Philadelphia. His writing has been featured in many digital and print magazines, including BOXX Press, his publishing project. He’s written two booklets of poetry: TRYING (Bottlecap, 2023) and What You Want (Dead Mall Press, 2023).
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