Off/Kilter: Interview w/ Gregoire Courtois

Leyla T: Tell us a bit about your latest novel The Agents.Gregoire Courtois: THE AGENTS is a novel about a few characters, drinking tea and shooting their colleagues in the office where they have to live their whole life. You can think this story takes place in a distant future, but who knows?Another important thing about this novel is that I wrote the first draft in 2007. In France, it was the presidential election and Nicolas Sarkozy (who would win eventually), had a terrific punchline: “work more to earn more”. As a writer interested in science and technology, I couldn’t understand how this kind of ideology could be popular. Earn more, ok, but who wants to work more? Didn’t mankind create technology and machines to work less? THE AGENTS were born there, when I imagined a future where no human had to work anymore but do it anyway because they couldn’t think about anything else.LT: There is a stark contrast in setting between your first book The Laws of the Skies and The Agents in that readers go from the open wilderness to a confined office space where the outer world almost does not exist because it is so obscured by fog. How did you settle on an office as the key setting for the novel and how does it (if at all) help the novel and its characters function?GC: The main idea of THE AGENTS is an equation: life is work and work is life. Therefore, the agents had to live their whole life in their workspace. I thought it would be a great challenge for me to contain the action in this small area, the office, and treat it like a whole world. As a matter of fact, it is the agents world, and corridors are borders, and the war for cubicles is their geopolitics.Anyway, the setting of THE AGENTS is not far away from the one of THE LAWS OF THE SKIES. After all, the office and the woods are two kinds of prisons. In the two novels, when the characters panic and run, they experience the same terrifying feeling. In the office, behind a cubicle, there is another cubicle as in the forest, you would find trees behind trees. All those characters are stuck in their own mental nightmare.LT: The Laws of the Skies and The Agents—while very different—do share a similar level of brutality that I think you as a writer uniquely do not shy away from. Is there anything you pull inspiration from when writing these scenes of violence and body horror?GC: I wouldn’t say that my descriptions are brutal. I think they are just accurate. In those two novels, the narrators share the same taste for scientific neutrality. They don’t bother with emotions. They are objective, pure. When they have to describe a wound, they do it in a clinical way. So, my inspiration is simple. It comes from the science and the nature. Those things are brutal and pitiless.4. There is a Kafka-esque flavour to the novel that reminds me of The Trial—this idea that we are participating blindly in something we know nothing about. That the Agents do not know what they are agents of, and that despite being tasked with the constant monitoring of data, they do not know what it is they are monitoring.LT: Can you touch on how this might speak to our own contemporary life and the meaning (or lack thereof ) that we assign to it?GC: As I said, we are surrounded by technology. Algorithms rule our lives and make decisions for us all the time. Today, high-frequency trading buys and sells stocks at the speed of light, makes people rich or poor, creates crashes, without any human intervention. Tomorrow, surgery will be safer when performed by a robotic hand and artificial intelligence than by a doctor. For the cancer diagnostics, it is already a reality: AI are more efficient than humans.In a few decades, humans will be useless for a lot of tasks. And that’s great (except for the trading of course). Civilization worked for this. Now, we have to think about what we will do of our lifetime, what do we really live for, and don’t fear the day when we won’t have to go to work anymore. This novel is about those choices we have to make. Because, maybe, there is no oppressor. Maybe we are the only ones responsible for our condition.LT: Dystopian worlds are seeing a popular resurgence in literature, tv, and film. We’ve gone from the classics of 1984 and Brave New World to Squid Games and book-to-TV adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale, among many others. As we enter 2022, how has the concept of what we consider a ‘dystopia’ changed or not changed in your opinion?GC: Good dystopia, and sci-fi in general, never talk about the future. They are a warning for today. When Orwell wrote 1984, it was about dictatorial states he knew very well (Spain of Franco, Germany of Hitler, Italy of Mussolini). If we recognize our society in this novel today, maybe it is not because Orwell has perfectly foreseen the future but because our societies came back to those dark ages and failed to evolve.Dystopia is the most political subgenre in sci-fi. If a lot of contemporary writers and filmmakers choose it to express themselves, maybe it is because they want to talk about politics. And maybe the readers and the audience want the artists to be more political. I hope so.LT: You know we have to ask!: are there any horror (or horror-adjacent) or sci-fi books on your list that you’re most looking forward to reading this year?GC: I didn’t have the time to read Nuestra parte de noche (Our part of night) by Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez, so I hope I could do it this year. It was translated in French a few months ago. It seems great, powerful, and creepy. I don’t think it is translated in English yet but I am sure it will be, because it is a worldwide hit.

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 A special thank you to Coach House and Gregoire Courtois for sharing more about The Agents with us!