The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
By Alain de Botton
McClelland & Stewart, 327 pages, $33
Reviewed by Mike Stimpson
A "bourgeois ideology" tells us work is one of the main things that can bring us happiness, Alain de Botton remarks in his latest collection of essays.
And if your work doesn't yield happiness, he continues, that work-centred ideology holds that it's your fault. You didn't choose your career wisely, or you haven't tried hard enough.
The Swiss-born Briton examines very different lines of work in this insightful, elegantly written book which is nicely illustrated with scores of photos.
He begins with a chapter describing how an under-noticed part of London takes in shiploads of cargo of all sorts from all corners of the world.
He also explores the operations of United Biscuit as an example of the complexities, hard work and economic risks behind small indulgences in our lifestyles, and looks at the mundane toil and politics inside a large accounting firm.
Other chapters burrow into career counselling, invention and entrepreneurship, the aviation industry, power transmission, an artist's solitary pursuits, and the launch of a broadcast satellite.
The most interesting of de Botton's offerings is his chapter on logistics -- how goods get from their point of origin to, eventually, the shops that sell them.
The way consumers are disconnected from the people and processes behind what they buy at the supermarket reminds him of Karl Marx's theory of alienation, which observes that workers are separated from each other, the natural world and the fruits of their labour.
Two centuries ago, people knew where the merchandise bought came from and often knew the people who produced it.
Economic globalization has changed all that. Store shelves display items from places we've never even visited, produced by people we will never meet.
De Botton spies fresh tuna steaks at a warehouse and decides tracing how the fish got from the Indian Ocean to England might help "mitigate the deadening, uniquely modern sense of dislocation between the things we so heedlessly consume in the run of our daily lives and their unknown origins and creators."
So off he goes to the Maldives, where tuna is caught, carved and chilled. He then follows the product on its flight to Britain and its ground transport to a warehouse and then a supermarket. He even persuades a woman to let him and his photographer follow that tuna to her home where it is served as supper.
He relates his odyssey in a way that is entertaining (in Maldives, he finds himself "unable wholly to suppress fleeting images of a joint future with" the fish processing plant owner's comely secretary) and educational (a newly caught tuna must be killed right away or its panicked blood rush will darken the meat). De Botton tells the story with charming wit and a masterful style.
But his assay of work, beautifully written as it is, seems sadly incomplete.
It's nice that he ruminates on alienation, but he pays short shrift to another "Marxist" matter: conflict between labour and capital.
It's as if de Botton, whose past books include the critically praised Architecture of Happiness, isn't aware of disparities in income and power.
He also doesn't pay enough attention to unglamorous toil. Sure, he spends a little time with those tuna fishermen in the Maldives. But some time with, say, hotel chambermaids or diner personnel would have made this a more well-rounded book.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work celebrates some often overlooked wonders of the everyday world, and duly notes parts of it that are dispiriting or just plain dull.
It doesn't, however, pay enough attention to the working class who are the majority of humankind.
But then, what de Botton does deliver is probably perfect for his overwhelmingly bourgeois readership.
