The Faculty of Indifference
Published on 15. September 2019
Book
Paperback/Softback
304 pages
978-1-78463-176-5 (ISBN)
Description
This is what a bad day looks like: a day when something happens.
Robert Exley works for the Faculty: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. In counter-terrorism, that's your job.
His wife worked there, too. She's been dead for years, but somehow she's never far away. Now their bookish son is leaving home. He writes an encrypted journal Exley feels obliged to decode, to read the things they cannot talk about.
When Exley takes on a colleague's case, it leads to a flat full of explosives, guns and cash. The trouble is, it's the wrong flat. And when Exley finds a man in an orange jumpsuit shackled to the floor deep beneath the Faculty's offices, everything he thinks he knows turns inside out.
Mixing Beckett and St Augustine, prison diaries, Japanese Go and Greek tragedy, The Faculty of Indifference is a profoundly black comedy about torture, boredom, suicide and love. Trapped in the moment between an intolerable past and so much worse to come, Exley finds there's nothing he can do but live.
Robert Exley works for the Faculty: he spends his life making sure that nothing ever happens. In counter-terrorism, that's your job.
His wife worked there, too. She's been dead for years, but somehow she's never far away. Now their bookish son is leaving home. He writes an encrypted journal Exley feels obliged to decode, to read the things they cannot talk about.
When Exley takes on a colleague's case, it leads to a flat full of explosives, guns and cash. The trouble is, it's the wrong flat. And when Exley finds a man in an orange jumpsuit shackled to the floor deep beneath the Faculty's offices, everything he thinks he knows turns inside out.
Mixing Beckett and St Augustine, prison diaries, Japanese Go and Greek tragedy, The Faculty of Indifference is a profoundly black comedy about torture, boredom, suicide and love. Trapped in the moment between an intolerable past and so much worse to come, Exley finds there's nothing he can do but live.
Reviews / Votes
The Faculty of Indifference is both funny, diverting, exhausting and baffling all at once. Whatever your tastes, Guy Ware is a writer whose name should be part of the contemporary literary discussion. His is a post-modernism that pushes the past into our increasingly confusing world. -- Rebekah Lattin-Rawstrone * Byte the Book * Ordinary life is a terrifying prospect in this existential satire about a London spook ... The Faculty of Indifference is a book of dark shadows and dry humour. It's a comedy about torture, death and loneliness, and an existential drama about a world that swirls and twists and turns on us without provocation. -- James Smart * The Guardian *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (UK-B)
Illustrations
Not illustrated
Dimensions
Height: 198 mm
Width: 129 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78463-176-5 (9781784631765)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Guy Ware is the author of five novels, all published by Salt, including The Peckham Experiment and, most recently, Our Island Story. Guy lives with his family in south London.