In his book, Cambodia, Brian Fawcett observes that “the continuous growth of authority and bureaucracy is a universal phenomenon of modern political life. But bureaucratic authority has a most unexpected twin: genocide.” PW Cooper’s novella, Beautiful Machine, offers a fictional rendering of this proposition. It tells the story of a thirteen-year-old girl in the midst of a war. The headmistress of her school delivers her to the local train station where she is placed aboard a train with others who look like her. The station is teeming with soldiers. Before the train leaves the station, someone tries to run away and a soldier shoots him on the tracks. The girl doesn’t know where the train is bound, nor the purpose of the trip, but she knows she has no choice but to board.
Cooper’s narrative is rendered in deliberately general terms. The soldiers use a name when they speak about the girl and their other charges, but we don’t know what that name is. It could be “Jew” or something more pejorative like “Kike” and this could be a Holocaust story. Maybe the soldiers are Nazis and maybe the train is headed for Auschwitz.
However, as the story proceeds, Cooper drops hints that suggest a different sort of tale. The soldiers have names like Brighten, Harris, and Burton. The prisoners have names like Nazmiya, Raheel and Waa’il, and although we never learn the girl’s real name, some of the prisoners call her Ahlem. Nazmiya wears a shawl. The soldiers have white skin and the prisoners have brown skin. We discover that we are reading an alternative history in the spirit of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Instead of Nazis, we have Americans; instead of Jews, we have Muslims being transported to the ovens.
Like all good dystopian literature, the horror of Beautiful Machine does not lie in imagined atrocities of a different time and place, but rather, in the fact that the world it presents is eerily familiar. As journalists like Robert Fisk and Chris Hedges document, fascism already has a strong foothold in the United States. Although the phrase “beautiful machine” is variously applied to the train that delivers the prisoners and to the human body itself, the phrase could just as easily be applied to American political life. The beautiful machine is the structures and bureaucracies set on seemingly inflexible tracks of racism and violence.
Using clean and understated prose, PW Cooper casts an unflinching gaze upon the world we have made for ourselves and draws it imaginatively to a logical conclusion—a final solution. The wonder of it is that you can download this novella for free from Smashwords. Visit Cooper’s blog here.