RM · P04

Four ways to be reasonable

Nobody in this novel argues badly. That is the difficulty.

Isabel Do Lago has spent fourteen years in Geneva litigating against states that use force, and she has the photographs in her files to prove what force looks like. In this book she meets four people who never use it, and she cannot answer any of them.

Her uncle explains a hospital. Thirty per cent of the appointments are missed, and not because people do not care about their own bodies — because the letter came in a language they do not read and the bus does not run at eight. So the appointment moves to the hour they are free. Attendance goes to ninety-one per cent. Nobody is coerced. Nobody is even aware of having been persuaded.

Her cousin defends a school system that names a child six weeks before a human being would notice. Four hundred and ten children a year used to leave compulsory education without a single documented enquiry. Now it is thirty-one. He concedes every objection she makes and then says the thing she cannot get past: in the four-hundred-and-ten world nobody decided either.

The architect asks her to regulate him. He says he hopes she wins, and that he means it sincerely, and that an entirely sincere manoeuvre is the most dangerous kind. He has wanted a review layer for three years and does not have the standing to obtain one.

And the woman on the stage tells four thousand people the joke about the machine that cannot count the r’s in a simple word, and then says that the fear underneath it is completely correct, and that nobody in the room can make two into three. Then she counts children instead, and gets a standing ovation, and thanks Isabel for coming.

Four ways to be reasonable. Not one of them is a lie, and not one of them is a trick, and the reader will find themselves agreeing before they have decided to.

Isabel wins one of these arguments outright, at a kitchen table, using the other person’s own childhood memory against them. He concedes every word. Nothing stops.

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