The Goldberg Variations

The world of work, predominantly corporate and office-based, makes up the bulk of many British and American lives. It’s literally what we do most of the day, for most of the days of the year.

But, despite the fact many of us live its weirdly intense emotions, it’s extremely hard to write about. When you put the words down, or even try and tell someone, it disappears, or sounds petty or prissy or boring or confusing. It’s an act of love to listen to it.

Joseph Conrad got around this by making it about mass murder. Gogol made it about an overcoat and the nature of existence. Franz Kafka was really writing about his family. David Graeber and Barbara Ehrenreich broke it down at great length, and rebuilt it in their own voices.

And Yoel Noorali has made it funny, but also about death and insanity. Which seems somehow totally correct. Below is an excerpt of his book, The Kingdom, which is anchored in his experiences inside Britain’s National Health Service — one of the biggest, and most idiotically run, organizations on earth.

He worked in the Liver Wing of a large British hospital, “a unit specialising in the diagnosis, treatment, and management of patients with cancers of the liver and pancreas” as an administrator, accidentally renamed “Yeol Morali” by the weirdnesses of the system.

His job was to click complex medical terms in software known as Liverware, with a small team of other administrators, including The Mother (who spends her time talking about her daughter, or her husband's dashcam installation business), The Moron (whose name is self-explanatory) and several generic others all referred to as Diane. Along the way he runs into an old university friend, Adam, who had a seemingly perfect life.

I think of this chapter, The Goldberg Variations, as the flipside to Juliette Cezzar’s essay from inside McKinsey. (Which, of course, works with the NHS.) It perfectly describes how it feels to be observed and managed like a thing, and the impact it has on both Yoel and his wife Charlotte.

I hope it won't be as gruesomely familiar to you as it was to me. (I suspect it will, though.) RS.

IN MY FIRST SPRING AT THE NHS I DAYDREAMED about death and dying often.

These visions started after The Mother swivelled around to ask us what field we’d specialise in if we were clinicians. She chose surgery. I recalled a previous month’s swivel, when the pair of us had been alone in the office.

‘Yoel, do you think you could ever kill a man?’ she’d asked.

‘...No,’ I’d replied, ‘I’m not very confrontational.’

‘But if you had to,’ she persisted, ‘could you?’

‘No,’ I repeated, trying to click, ‘I’m weak.’

‘What if they raped Charlotte?’

‘Is Liverware working for you?’

‘What if they raped Charlotte?’

I kept clicking, to no effect. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t hunt a rapist down.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ The Mother said. ‘I meant what if they were raping Charlotte?’

‘Charlotte’s very safety-conscious,’ I said. ‘She gets Ubers everywhere.’

‘Do you know how many rapes happen in Ubers?’

‘No. Do you?’

‘My dad used to be a cabbie.’

‘I think Liverware might be down.’

‘He says they’re all sex freaks.’

‘Whose turn is it to contact IT?’

‘You haven’t answered. Do you think you could ever kill?’

I tried to click Liverware to life, sighing something to the effect that I’d do my best to kill a cabbie in that one example of an attempted rape. The Mother continued staring, waiting to be asked the same question. Her eyes made it apparent she’d only asked the question to be asked it in return. I sighed again.

‘And what about you?’

‘If anyone ever attempted to harm my child,’ she said, ‘I would murder them. I would find the power to kill. That’s what being a mother is all about.’

She didn’t have the composure for surgery, I felt.