Exposure by Louis Greenberg
(Titan Books, 2021)
Reviewed by Jamie Mollart
In 2019, I visited the ‘Beyond The Road’ exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. A collaboration between musician James Lavelle, and a number of artists, the exhibition remixed his albums, The Road Part I and II, into an immersive experience of sound, smell, film, visuals and sculpture. It was designed to create a multi-disciplinary experience you were free to explore, interact and lose yourself in. I wandered around it for 2 hours and left feeling as if I had been rewired. It took me the rest of the day to get back to myself and I still think about it regularly.
The reason I bring this up is because this is the world in which Exposure plays. It is set in a parallel England, similar to ours in many ways, but in which the corporations have control of healthcare and everyday life to an even greater degree than they do in our version.
Petra is walking down a street when Vincent falls from a ladder at her feet, and they feel an instant connection, going on a date to a theatre show, for which Vincent has won tickets.
But this is not a show like others, this is the mysterious and infamous Metamuse. A theatre company run by two equally mysterious women, Olivia Jouval and Rashida Barnes, which provides immersive experiences on a massive scale, popping around the world and then vanishing again.
The first time they visit the theatre it sparks their relationship, but when they return for a second time things take a more sinister turn. Petra starts seeing characters from the show in her everyday life and Vincent begins to believe his dead daughter is alive within it. As boundaries between reality and theatre blur Petra realises their meeting may not have been accidental at all, and they could be part of a much more sinister and wider reaching plan.
Exposure is a uniquely English piece of sci-fi, it sits with Black Mirror or Vurt in being quintessentially about this island, dealing with its topics in a way that only the English can. (Although strangely the author is South African). It’s both refreshing and surreal to have a dark and disturbing piece of sci-fi set in one of the most well to do middle English towns I can think of (Leamington Spa), and that combined with the off-kilter version of our present day gives the novel a sense of creeping disquiet.
As the characters fall more under the spell of the show’s macabre vision disquiet descends into something much more disturbing and elusive. Layering of realities lies at the heart of the book; asking the question what is reality?—is it what we believe, is it what’s shown to us, is it a collective experience, or something else entirely?
I mentioned ‘Beyond the Road’ because Greenberg based the plot on some real immersive theatre groups and while much of it feels fantastical, I relate to the sense of confusion and disorientation that this total immersion can give. Exposure is of the zeitgeist, this feels the direction we are heading—with Secret Cinema, War of the Worlds Immersive, the trend for Escape Rooms and now the might of Facebook being leveraged as Meta—lending a prophetic, cautionary tone. We chase experience now more than ever, our always on culture pushing us to more extreme IRL experiences, and Metamuse seems a logical, if horrific end game.
If I had any criticism, it’s that the final third becomes dense and oblique, with it difficult to unpick the true narrative from the subterfuge. The layers have built so much that the plot is as immersive, confusing, and multi-layered as the theatre it portrays. This is of course probably the point; however, it means the denouement is too illusive and subtle to be truly satisfying, but it hardly matters as it’s one hell of a ride to get there.
Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.