His Debit as a Man

Some 470 pages into Alex Kurtagić’s Mister, after the heatwave, the hyperinflation, the arrest, the cell, the riots, and a suit whose price rises between the scan and the payment, the hero sits down to audit his life. He has two doctorates, a fortified cottage in Surrey, and a horror of nearly everyone alive. He has watched a continent fall apart around his cufflinks. And the entry that sinks him, the one the whole book has been saving up, is this:

“his credit as a scientist was cancelled by his debit as a man” (p. 471).

His debit, in case the accounting is unclear, is that he never had children.

I want to take that sentence seriously, because the novel does. Mister (Iron Sky Publishing, 2009) is one of the bitterest comic novels I have read, and I mean the comic part. It is also, beneath its black crêpe of decline and contempt, a breeder’s morality play. The pessimism is a costume. The verdict is reproductive. And for a book that hates the world this much, it is remarkably keen that the right people keep stocking it.

First, the jokes, which are real

Credit where it is owed, because a review that pretends a book is unfunny is just a different kind of propaganda.

The premise is a man and a business trip. An unnamed British IT consultant, selling tax-avoidance software to a client of doubtful substance, flies to Madrid in December 2022, and nothing works. Kurtagić’s future is Kafka by way of Brussels: a European super-state of forms, levies, surveillance and water rationing, where the street thermometer reads 46 °C and the next sentence is “It was 8 o’clock in the morning.” (p. 169). Price tags update themselves. A shop till keeps recalculating the total until the card goes through. By the time he buys a replacement suit, the euro has been devalued by eighty per cent.

Then he is arrested and confronted with a dossier that recasts his week as a string of hate crimes, and the book finds its best register. The detention runs for six chapters; the interrogation chapter alone runs forty-five pages (pp. 327 to 371), and the comedy is in the loops. The detainee’s legal code arrives in a Tesco trolley: 125 volumes, “totalling over 200,000 pages” (p. 398). His state-appointed lawyer, Profit, refuses to explain it, because “as an enemy of the state, you have no right to waste government time” (p. 401). Asked to summarise, Profit says “That is impossible. The law is too complex.” Asked to simplify, he says “That would be the same as misleading you” (p. 401). That exchange is as good as anything in the bureaucratic-absurdist tradition, and I laughed out loud.

The best running joke is the hero’s vanity. He is a man who, under interrogation by the state, still insists on his titles: “stop calling me Mister. The proper form is Doctor” (p. 343). The interrogator’s reply is perfect: “As you wish, Mister” (p. 343). A whole novel’s title, turned into a demotion. His suit decays chapter by chapter, and Kurtagić knows exactly what he is doing: “The disintegration of his business outfit was co-material with the disintegration of his identity” (p. 404). The apocalypse as a dry-cleaning emergency is a genuinely good comic idea.

And the book cannot stop winking at itself. A novelist tells the hero that her husband wrote a dystopia about “a genius IT consultant who goes on a business trip to Madrid” (p. 289). The hero asks the title. “It’s called Mister.” (p. 290). He quips: “Hopefully not your husband’s” (p. 290). Later a news report mentions “delirious novels by Alex Kurtagic” (p. 437). The hero’s eccentric friend is called Wermod, which happens to be the name of the publishing house behind the book’s own imprint. It is cheeky, and some of it lands.

But hold on to those winks. They are not decoration. They are the tell.

Then the flaws, plainly

The bestiary. Almost every non-white character in Mister is introduced through an animal comparison or a pseudo-scientific skull reading, and this is done by the narration, not just by the narrator’s mouth. It is relentless, it is cruel, and after the hundredth time it is also dull: a cheap trick standing in for characterisation. The foreword, by Tomislav Sunić, does not treat it as satire. It praises the hero for reasoning “with his cortex” while the non-white masses use “their paleocortex” (p. vi). When the introduction applauds the prejudice, the prejudice is not being exposed. It is being shown off.

The antisemitic thread. It is not incidental. A sympathetic character spends pages expounding a real academic’s theories about Jewish intellectual movements as a hostile force, then adds, with a straight face, “but don’t believe any talk about conspiracies!” (p. 131), before the conversation keeps going in the same direction. Later the interrogator blurts “The gold standard leads to the death camps” (p. 355), a line built so that any charge of antisemitism will sound hysterical. That is not satire of the accuser. It is a pre-emptive alibi.

The strawmen. The hero wins every argument, because every opponent has been written to lose. The feminist is a shrieking cartoon, the liberal friend is a vain cosmetic ruin, the interrogator is a racial caricature. A satire that cannot imagine one intelligent adversary is not satire. It is a fencing match against a coat stand.

The length. 478 pages for roughly three weeks of plot. Catalogues run for whole pages, fantasies of violence repeat nearly word for word, monologues circle like baggage on a broken carousel. The book even confesses. The novelist describing her husband’s Mister admits “not much really happens” (p. 289). The foreword means it as praise when it says “The whole book reads like an antechamber of waiting. And waiting.” (p. vii). It does. I waited.

The ledger

Now the part that matters to this publication.

Read Mister for its surface and you get the familiar mood board of the reactionary pessimist: civilisations fall, decline is cyclical, the sun is hostile, the crowd is vile. There is even a fine pessimist image: “The sun fulgurated with hateful misanthropy overhead” (p. 451). But track one thread through the book, the hero’s childlessness, and a different shape appears.

On page 23 he is comfortably indifferent: “having not reproduced himself, the problems of future generations did not concern him” (p. 23). This is the position the novel sets out to punish.

On page 201, watching a news story about Brussels reinstating national service, he is “quietly relieved that he had never had children” (p. 201), but only because those children might have demanded an explanation. Even his unborn are debt collectors. A page later the relief has turned to self-reproach: “he had not reproduced himself in order to maximise his leisure time, his personal freedom, and his material comfort” (p. 202). And then the book’s most revealing sentence, which deserves to be read twice: “if any indigenous Europeans were having children today, they were almost certainly planning a revolution” (p. 202).

There it is. Procreation as insurrection. A cot as a barricade.

By page 277 the reproach has become doctrine: “Unborn talent was a loss to society and to humanity as a whole” (p. 277). And by the final reckoning on pages 470 and 471, the hero condemns himself for having lived not as “a link in a chain of generations, morally obligated to those before him, ultimately answerable to those after him” (p. 471). As a man of “superior endowments”, he “had neither contributed to the human gene pool” nor left the world better (p. 471). Hence the debit. Hence the headline.

Notice what is never asked anywhere in this ledger: what the child would have been for. Not for itself. The hypothetical children of Mister exist to man barricades, carry genes, fill a demographic hole, and hold their father to account. They are instruments of a lineage. A book so allergic to being used by the state cannot see that it proposes to use people before they exist.

“They do not ask to be born”

The cruellest irony in Mister is that it knows the antinatalist argument. It just aims it.

At a dinner with an old university friend, the hero argues for eugenics, and says “Yes, I am” when she accuses him of it (p. 273). Defending himself, he says of children born into slum poverty that “the only victims are their children. They do not ask to be born” (p. 276).

That is our premise, almost word for word. No one consents to being born. Every birth is a wager placed on someone who cannot be asked.

But in Mister, the consent argument is a loaded gun pointed in one direction only. It is fired at the poor and the non-white, the people whose fertility the novel treats as a threat from its first chapter to its last. It is never turned toward the hero’s own hypothetical heirs, conceived into the collapsing world he spends 478 pages describing. One page after the dinner speech, he is berating himself for failing to breed (p. 277). The unconsenting child is a victim when it is born in the wrong district, and a civic duty when it is born in Surrey.

The novel frets endlessly about who breeds. It never once seriously asks whether anyone should. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement appears exactly once, in a passing clause about someone else’s reading (p. 261). On the same page a lonely office worker’s imagined suicide is pitied because he died “an isolated social atom, without friends, without a cause” (p. 261), and the hero is glad he has “a wife, creativity, and a brain” (p. 261). Solitude is the tragedy; a cause is the cure. The thought that a life might be a harm in itself never gets through the door.

The friend, as it happens, has no children either. The hero’s comeback is the chapter’s last line: “Then you’ll be poor in your old age, and we’ll die out” (p. 277). He means it as a threat. To an antinatalist, it is the only outcome on offer that harms no one, since nobody who is never born is left to suffer it. Everything turns on that little word “we”, and the novel never stops to say who is in it.

The objection: it is only satire

The strongest objection deserves its full weight. The hero is plainly ironised. He is pompous, vain about his hair, obsessed with his suit. He disowns a fellow traveller as soon as the man becomes inconvenient, since any link to him “was bad for business” (p. 112). He insists on “Doctor” while under arrest. Surely, the objection runs, the reader is meant to laugh at him, and so at his conclusions.

Laugh at him, yes. At his conclusions, no.

The irony in Mister targets the hero’s vanity and his cowardice, never his ledger. Nothing in the plot falsifies his racial judgements. Nearly every non-white character he meets confirms the type he assigned them on sight. And the book’s arc does not deflate his final self-indictment; it builds to it. The joke is not that he believes these things. The joke is that he believed them quietly.

The paratext settles it. Sunić’s foreword quotes the hero’s self-indictment from the cell and calls it “the best and the most succinct summary of European thinkers’ cowardice” (p. viii). It adds, approvingly, that “Mister seems to have come to his senses now” (p. viii). That is not how anyone introduces an unreliable narrator. That is how you introduce a convert.

And the novel names its own method. An economist character explains how he hides his argument inside the enemy’s vocabulary: “What I do is disguise myself as a rat and inject an anti-virus” (p. 107). When a book tells you how it smuggles, believe it. The farce is the rat costume. The ledger is the injection.

A note for the black-metal shelf

Kurtagić knows the genre, and Mister is studded with it. But in this novel black metal is never a sound, never a negation, never the cold refusal that drew most of us to it. It is infrastructure. Early on it is a topic for a lecture on “the Black Metal scene as a decentralised virtual trust network” (p. 95). Later it is a media empire, a political party, a soundtrack for settlers. The music of No is drafted into the service of a bloodline’s Yes. That is the novel in miniature: it borrows the black robes of negation and uses them to swaddle a nursery.

Verdict

Mister is worth reading the way a toxicology report is worth reading: carefully, with gloves, and to understand what killed the patient. It is funnier than it has any right to be. The bureaucratic farce is sharp, the vanity comedy is sharper, and the in-jokes have a cheek I half admire. It is also bloated, cruel by method rather than by accident, and built on an argument that only works if you accept who counts as human before the first page.

But its deepest failure, for a pessimist, is not its politics. It is its cowardice about its own premise. Kurtagić’s hero looks at a world of heat, debt, surveillance and collapse, and concludes that his great sin was not adding to the population that must endure it. For all its bile, Mister cannot let go of the oldest optimism there is: that the answer to a ruined world is more of the right people.

The novel ends with its hero boarding the flight home, asking of his escape: “Home free, yes! Home, free? Yes? But, for how long?” (p. 478).

The pessimist’s answer is shorter than the book. For as long as people keep booking new passengers onto that flight.