FOLLOWERS / AUTHOR: MEGAN ANGELO / PUBLISHER: HARPER COLLINS / RELEASE DATE: 9TH JANUARY
Satirising the likes of celebrity and social media is a topic with targets too numerous to quantify, and is such a ludicrous concept to begin with the task is often rendered redundant by its own subject matter. Dealing with such a problem is what makes Followers such a captivating read.
The first of the book’s two plotlines takes place in 2015, where disillusioned blogger and sporadic novelist Orla uses her meagre influence to transform her flatmate Floss from just another hot girl posting selfies and vacuous nonsense on Instagram to a revered celebrity, despite the latter’s demonstrable lack of any kind of discernable talent. Running in parallel in 2050 is the life of Marlow, Floss’ 35-year-old daughter who lives in a town created as a reality TV show, where the populace’s fame and success is dependant on the quantity of people obsessing over their every waking moment, and after a major life decision is dictated for her a subsequent discovery motivates her to investigate hidden secrets of her family history.
Along the way, the book meditates on the transitory and arbitrary nature of fame, where the stupidest of things can make people celebrated for the most pointless of reasons. Chiefly highlighting this are early chapters where Orla crafts Floss’ notoriety with an ease that makes you wonder how many talentless and interchangeable people’s names you only know due to the application of similar methods.
The point is not to ridicule the obsessive desire for celebrity or the kind of people who seek to attain it, but rather the bizarre nature of the very concept of fame itself. Since people can attain notoriety through the most ludicrous of means, maintaining its ephemera relies solely on the whim of those who have become, to varying degrees, obsessed with you, hence the book’s title.
Marlow’s unveiling of revelations coincides with their being related in the past, so that even though the two stories are separate, they still complement each other as part of a larger whole. The dual journeys are highly personal ones, seeing Orla gradually transform into everything she used to despise as she is sucked into the world of the infamous, while Marlow realises that, despite her disdain for the life her mother chose for her, she is nevertheless part of the problem it causes by performing as somebody whose artificially constructed life is advertised as perfect, while also spending the best part of two decades as the face of a mood stabiliser.
The women are flawed, but it’s precisely this which makes them so compelling. Each is a product of her environment and, as they gradually shift towards enlightenment of what it will take for them to be happy, the book tacitly asks if in their place you would really have done anything differently.
