It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, is a cop out.
Rhetorically, it’s clear, easy to agree with, and safe to pronounce in even the most banal contexts. But if anyone besides me or Charles Dickens uses it, feel free to ignore the rest. They’re most often trying to run out the clock.
To the best/worst of times view, one might respond: pick a fucking side already. Few will.
In the novel Grime, Sibylle Berg picks a side and argues that we’re in the worst of times. Grime is the rare contemporary novel that can make you feel like a conspirator for reading it. This is a book that must have taken real rage and a strong stomach to write, and for the author to put their name on. It demands the same strong stomach and rage from the reader.
GRM Brainfuck was the original title of the book, first published in Germany in 2019, then renamed for U.S. audiences. The book gets up to that same pitch quickly enough, carrying the fondest wishes and sweetest hopes of its characters with sandpaper gloves. Its terse, hard-boiled tone is reminiscent of James Ellroy, who writes largely about professional fixers and killers. Through its main characters — four kids entering puberty in Rochdale, England, and then London — Grime indicts our global civilization from top to bottom. Berg’s style is as unforgiving as their worldview, with no heroes, no safe spaces to pause in and feel good about what’s going on. The book resides in what’s left after you boil it all down. It occurs beyond euphemism or politesse. As in Ellroy’s books, there’s no interpreting our way out of any of it — what happens happens.
So, what happens? Our four protagonists all begin in Rochdale, where Karen is seduced, drugged, and pimped out for a month in an abandoned building by her boyfriend. Hannah’s mother dies in an understaffed ER when the doctor prioritizes a whiter, better-heeled patient, and her father is coaxed to suicide by a bad-faith euthanasia website. Don’s father flees and her brother dies of a poverty-related pulmonary disease, then her mother and brother are killed in a high-rise fire. Peter is raped in a flop house for migrant workers.
Our four protagonists find one another in squats, homeless shelters, and around Rochdale, and they vow revenge. They improvise ways to support and protect one another. They move to London.
The global society, whose footsteps are heard only at a distance in Rochdale, becomes ever-present once the characters relocate. It appears in the immigrant workers displacing the poor, the planetary elite displacing the merely rich, and the oblivious tourists.
The four kids find a squat in a section of the city that’s been forced to pause its condo-building. If hell is other people, London is just a bigger hell. London is where the controllers — the programmers, secret police, oligarchs, and fading aristocrats come into sharper focus.
Just as they arrive in London, a larger social shift occurs as the government starts offering universal income. After a moment of euphoria, the scheme shows its teeth as a carrot and stick attached to a new regime of surveillance and control, along with decreased services and opportunities. The people continue to be ground down economically, but with greater consequences for speaking out, and an officially sanctioned perspective that their misfortune is their own doing.
At every turn, Berg eschews opportunities for false comfort. There are moments in the story when the characters have a chance to do the right thing — a family might find common cause after a parent flees, or a father and daughter might grow closer after the death of the family’s matriarch. There are ample occasions for the characters to rise to the occasion. But except for our four protagonists, they never do. They’re too tired or harried or distracted, or they just have something better to do. The small failures that define the lives of the protagonists are endemic to the world of Grime, which illustrates the ways these failures are engineered into the very fabric of society through overwork, incessant entertainment, and ridicule.
Contemporary fiction is uniquely difficult these days. The world in 36 months (about the time it takes to write and publish a book) doesn’t seem like it will resemble the present. The best bet, for many writers, is just to interpret the present into the future.
This is one reason that dystopias are popular these days. And Grime occupies a dystopian near future, replete with AI-run governments, universal basic income, shallow digital sleights, voluntary self-surveillance by the population, and vertiginous social inequality. Is this the near future, really? Or is it simply that the present is slippery, hypersensitive, and litigious — making it safer to slide on the prophylactic of fiction?
Grime, while very much of the present moment, is also antipodal to much popular fiction. It’s no murder mystery set in a series of Architectural Digest houses. There are no young people in sweaters with existential crises who never wonder where their rent is coming from. No cats or dogs or simpering younger siblings get saved in the name of likability. No, Grime is a sharp implement to scratch a boil. And like when you draw blood from the boil, and have to accept that it’s really there, that it’s a real problem, the book hangs around and colors your perception afterwards.
The four main characters are all wounded and betrayed by people they trust. The misanthropy of Grime is one characterized by a child’s pain, which stands in sharp contrast to the opportunistic misanthropy of the technocrats. The book spends a lot of time with programmers, politicians, and patricians — and their unique brand of pessimism. They hate human beings because human beings don’t obey like machines. They hate human beings because they can’t be purchased outright, and because they cost so much to rent. They hate human beings because human beings don’t appreciate like assets, and because they take some trouble to dispose of.
Grime captures the shared sensation of barely hanging on as we plunge headlong into a future that promises lower costs and higher efficiency by shitcanning a lot of people who seem quite a lot like us. It captures the loathing and optimized indifference of a self-service portal whenever something goes wrong with health insurance or our travel plans or our career trajectories. (One of the last cogent conversations I had with my mother was a maddening back-and-forth about how to navigate just such a portal.)
The book is fiction. And maybe things aren’t entirely fucked. But it sure feels good to hear someone say in detail that they are indeed as fucked as we dare imagine. Grime does this without hitting a false note.
There’s quite a lot of child prostitution in the book. It’s employed as more than just a provocation. Over the past 20 or more years, as the market has usurped more of daily life, it’s comforting to think some things are sacrosanct, like children. But kids have an exceptionally hard time of it in Grime. Berg positions systematized child rape within the landscape of the book as a natural outcome of a global marketplace that has abdicated all moral authority with which to shame its winners.
The exploitation of children is the line at which the authority, majesty, and power of the one, Holy, Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church faltered and collapsed to a laughingstock where no one’s laughing. To let the same offenses slide for a fat-faced prince, politician, or billionaire would seem to make a sad joke of the human race. This is why a distracted public won’t let Epstein go. And it’s a point Grime returns to repeatedly.
More generally, sex and sexual arousal is one form of intoxication that is always pernicious, if not fatal, in Grime. One interesting subplot in the book is the introduction of a virus that neutralizes testosterone, diminishing the confidence, aggression, and sex drive in the men of London. This change brings about a calmer, less violent society in Grime, but also a duller populace, less equipped to stop the tightening controls being imposed on it. The removal of testosterone also brings about an acute state of crisis among the male villains, who have arranged their lives around aggression and sex, and now can no longer make sense of the world, or their place in it.
Disgust with the human condition is a more vibrant strand in European than American literature. The most prominent practitioner these days would be Michel Houellebecq. His unforgiving vision of human conventions, illusions, and desires across all the possible ends of the political and sexual spectrums has made him some enemies. But, as with Berg, his books are a breath of fresh air amid the smarm and happy talk that suffocates too many conversations these days.
Houellebecq’s perspective in Submission and Serotonin differs from Berg though, because all the things he hates in humanity are rather active — if not predominant — in his own desires. First and foremost, his narrators want to smoke, eat well, and fuck, and won’t pretend otherwise.
Berg — writing Grime in the third person — isn’t willing to make such concessions. Berg is straightedge, meaning they neither drink nor take drugs. And that relentlessness shows up in the prose. The point of view is locked in. The intolerance of hypocrisy is more or less absolute. The hedging, hemming, hawing, and hypocrisy that I allow myself is partly the result of the fact that the world often seems very different to me from one moment to the next. And being occasionally intoxicated has something to do with that. The perspective of Grime is a hard one to stay in. As the song goes: “Don’t drink, don’t smoke, what do you do?” The answer in Grime is to burn down the world.
The protagonists do get revenge. But in the exacting landscape of Grime — the world of what it all boils down to — is that a triumph? Or are they just moving the nightmare around? Is this retribution or redistribution? This may sound like karma, but it also sounds a little like the logic of a truly global economy. In a global economy, there’s no place outside to exploit — no frontiers. There’s no place outside to dump waste. There’s not really any growth, so much as a series of schemes to move the poverty, drudgery, and misery around to another corner.
Outer space is a possibility for something, though we’re not sure what. The sections of the book set on Mars are full of billionaires sullenly golfing and trying to get excited about the colony’s stable of prostitutes, while awaiting guests who never arrive.
AI, the other supposed frontier of innovation, shows up in Grime as the buggy, Adderall-and-PowerPoint fever dream of a costless administrative gulag. It’s not magic, or even particularly advanced. It’s just a new excuse to forego the debts we owe one another in a functioning society.
The world the book shows us is one where we’re stuck with ourselves. Finding people to do the grunt work depends on the ancient and nasty business of capturing or persecuting another set of invisible, or at least deserving victims. Not that that’s ever stopped anyone. We all exist inside the walls of the same endless siege, and the same siege mentality. Cannibalism is a question of when, not if.
Grime leads the reader to ask if the global order upon which we all now rely is an inhuman zero-sum regime of cannibalism. Maybe “cannibalism” is uncharitable. We all live in a society. Give a little and take a little. The difference between cooperation and cannibalism may simply be a matter of a few percentage points. It may be a matter of morale. I work for a living most days, and my morale fluctuates. A big part of morale, though, is the big picture of what you’re working for. The big picture that the characters in Grime inhabit is one where a plausible concept of a decent collective future has vanished, and where the better-adjusted kids are an equally lost cause, largely because the grown-ups have sold off the next generation’s mental capacity to imagine a future to the tech and social media folks.
Is it the worst of times? There are plenty of people who say the world today is as good as it’s ever gotten, and we’re one iPhone upgrade, two vaccines, and an interest-rate tweak away from heaven on earth. They have a version of history to support them. They have statistics around things like life expectancy and infant mortality to support them. What’s not to believe? What’s not trust? I’m not sure, but there’s something wrong with their tone. If things are so great, then why are they so loud? Why do they seem so scared of letting a word in edgewise?
Berg gives these perspectives an airing, usually in the form of political or marketing rhetoric, whose subtext is “just stop squirming and this will all be over soon.”
In 2024, Berg became one of 720 Ministers in the European Parliament, having won election as a German representative in 2024. At the time, Politico named them one of “The 23 kookiest MEPs heading to the European Parliament.” Thanks, guys.
I’m not one to lionize politicians. In my opinion, the best of them are the ones who take constituent services seriously. But there’s something to be said for the author of such an aggressively bleak book wading into the hands-on frustration of a legislative body.
Grime settles several scores, and sets up more to come. My main gripe with the book is that after so much action, sensation, and scheming, it ends unresolved. The main characters grow up. Childhood ends. They begin to settle into the unsatisfactory rhythms of their adult lives and to drift apart. The end. But no!
There are two more books in the trilogy, waiting for either a translator or for me to learn German. Regardless, after reading Grime, you may need to take a break before diving back in.
Colin Dodds is an award-winning author and filmmaker who lives in New York City, with his wife and children. His essays appear regularly at No Homework, and his latest film, The Demon Core of Fresh Kills, is currently in production.
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Sounds like a must-read. And here I was, wondering why things seem so insane. Did this begin in 1492, or was it always thus?
Yes, great review. Putting Grime on the TBR list.