J. J. Voskuil (1926–2008)

This second part of the saga takes the career of reluctant ethnologist Maarten Koning forward through the years 1965-1972. Despite his continuing doubts about the scientific validity of the work they are doing and his repugnance at the idea of being a career civil servant, Maarten, approaching forty, is now the head of a growing team catalogueing data about popular culture and de facto deputy director of the Office, which is itself growing and has to move into a larger building; he's also show more becoming an established figure on the European academic committee- and conference- circuit, and a leading expert on the distribution of different types of threshing-flails.

Amsterdam is changing too, Maarten's colleagues are increasingly moving out to new suburbs and buying cars. Maarten and Nicolien cling on to their provisional, studenty existence for a long time, but eventually they too move out of their little flat in the working-class Jordaan into a grown-up apartment (but they do stay in the city). In the background are all the unrest and demonstrations of the late sixties, but they only have a very marginal effect on the story. Maarten does take a firm political stand when the question of "scientific cooperation" with a South African cultural organisation is raised, and he and Nicolien join a Vietnam-War protest march, but that's as far as it goes.

As in Part 1, what really interests Voskuil is the odd way human relations operate in a workplace setting, putting people into very intimate contact with a small fragment of each other's lives. His episodic narrative style gives the same prominence to disputes about coathooks and shelf-space as it does to weddings and funerals, and he's forever reminding us that scientific committees spend as much time debating changes to their membership, grammatical errors in the Minutes, or the location of the next meeting as they do talking about actual science, and that those topics are often the most interesting and controversial.

Arguably, there isn't much real development in this second part, Voskuil seems to have established his terms of engagement in the first part. But there's so much in the detailed observation to enjoy and (if you've ever been involved in any kind of office politics) to recognise and laugh at. Voskuil writes about stuff other novelists mostly don't find interesting, and he ignores a lot of the things they do write about. He needs his large canvas to show the random and fragmented nature of life — there's one incident in this book where Maarten gets a follow-up to a letter sent thirteen years ago in part one; the matter in question is still unresolved at the end of part two, and we don't know yet whether it's going to be of any importance. show less

The seventh and final part of Voskuil’s vast epic of office life — also by far the shortest — takes up the story on the first working day after Maarten’s retirement from the Institute. We follow him through the normal problems of adjusting to post-work life: recalibrating his life with Nicolien now that they are both at home all day, coping with the fact that he can no longer influence the way things go in his former department, and properly winding down his professional show more responsibilities outside the office.

Maarten and Nicolien go for numerous walks or bike rides in Amsterdam or elsewhere in the Netherlands, often described in great detail — something I particularly enjoyed because I know a lot of those places — and of course this gives Maarten the opportunity to reflect on how the world is changing in ways he isn’t comfortable with, something we all experience as we get older.

Despite the title, this doesn’t seem to be literally about the death of the character Maarten, but rather about the way retirement marks the death of the persona we create through our work. So it’s not quite as gloomy as you might expect.

Of course there’s a kind of euphoria about getting to the end of what seemed like an impenetrable wall of books when I first encountered it. Whether the effort required is commensurate with the result is hard to say — it is certainly one of the most intimate and merciless dissections of the curious social experience of office work I’ve come across, and the sheer length and near real-time quality of the book is part of the way it achieves that effect. But it remains one person’s experience. Voskuil doesn’t claim to be able to see working life through the eyes of anyone other than his autobiographical protagonist. Maarten is always Maarten, who is clearly 95% Voskuil, he never turns into a Dilbertish Everyman character, although a lot of his experiences turn out to be things that any long-term office worker can probably identify with, laugh at, or become frustrated about. But it’s also quite clear that many readers are going to find ploughing through several thousand pages of ethnographers arguing about office space and typewriter ribbons simply boring and futile. Particularly since the book is still only available in Dutch or German. Approach at your own risk! show less

When people talk about Het bureau, it's mostly to joke about its extraordinary length: a writer who has already taken 1200 pages to get his alter ego Maarten Koning through university (Bij nader inzien, 1963) is obviously not going to be able to compress his whole working life into the space of a novella, but still, 5000 pages split over seven parts is a bit extreme by most people's standards.

In this first part, we follow Maarten from 1957, when he is recruited to work in "The Office", a show more small research institute for Dutch language and culture in Amsterdam (based on the real Meertens Institute, where Voskuil worked himself), up to mid-1965, when Maarten's boss, Anton Beerta (based on P J Meertens) retires.

Voskuil's idea seems to be to be to examine the strange ways that office-work modifies normal human behaviour, with a gaze that's somewhere between that of the analytical ethnographer and the satirical novelist. The book gives as much prominence to questions of office furniture, budgets, typewriter ribbons and coffee breaks as it does to more conventionally important life-events, and often more: courtship and marriage, illness and death happen largely offstage, and we often see them only through the inevitable collections to be taken, flowers bought, and so on.

A big concern is how seriously it's possible to take the work that we do. Beerta clearly believes firmly in the value of the work the office does, but Maarten is sceptical — even though he does his best to justify his existence and produce scientifically-valid research, he finds it hard to believe that it really matters to anyone whether there are regional differences in farmers' customs for the disposal of mares' afterbirths (I assumed that this was simply a spoof, but apparently this is exactly what Voskuil's first published research was about!).

Although this is all back in the typewriter-and-index-card era, and the office I worked in had a radically different scale and purpose from Voskuil's, I was astonished how many of the day-to-day concerns of office politics Voskuil picks up on I recognised. The peculiar things that happen when you put a bunch of people with no other direct social connection together in a work environment and give them something to do that only has an indirect connection to the real world are obviously more general and universal than we might expect. And also often very much funnier.

I was hoping that I wouldn't like this book, but it's starting to look as though I'm going to have to read the remaining six parts after all... show less

With this fourth — and longest — part, we reach the mid-point of the series. We're in the years 1975-79, so Maarten Koning has now been at the Office for twenty years, and he's reached his fifties. The focus changes from the international scientific disputes which dominated Part Three, and we're now much more involved with Maarten's struggles to come to terms with his role as a manager and find ways to impose his authority on co-workers who have different ideas about how the job should show more be done — and indeed about what the job actually is, as there are still plenty of grey areas in the definition of ethnology as a subject.

The foreground is filled, as always, with the minute detail of coffee-breaks, filing-systems, staff-meetings and committees, but slightly offstage there's also the less distinct story of how Maarten's work is affecting his marriage. Maarten's mother-in-law is declining gradually into dementia, whilst Beerta is still mentally alert but has never quite recovered physically from the stroke he suffered at the end of Part Three, and is now living in a care-home. As the title has already given it away, it's no surprise to see this part ending with the Office being renamed in Beerta's honour. Other memorable set-pieces include a rather harrowing week of interviews of candidates for a vacant post, and a couple of departmental outings, on one of which Maarten has to be saved from sinking into a morass.

The scale and level of trivial detail of this novel is such that you sometimes get the depressing illusion that you're reading it in real time, and that Maarten will never catch up with you in age, but that's also its strength: it's easy to believe that no-one else has ever got close to the realism with which Voskuil captures the wave of despair that runs through you when you hear the words "I just have a small point concerning the minutes of the last meeting..." show less