Book Review: The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

By Alain De Botton Published by Hamish Hamilton Reviewed by Tracy Fantin

There are many casualties of life at the Bar. Reading for pleasure is one of them. So on the rare occasions when you find the time to read something that is not a: a. brief, b. case, c. statute, d. commentary or text, e. newspaper, or f. online news service, you want it to be good. You hope against hope that that it will deliver pure pleasure. If you’re really lucky, it might consume and transport you. Laugh out loud? Extra points.

This book does many of those things. Perhaps surprisingly, it does so while examining the modern workplace and making us think about why we do the work we do – how we choose our jobs; how our choice of occupation has come to define our identity; the origin of the widely held beliefs that work should make us happy and that we ought to know what it is we really want to do; why we hanker for a “calling”; and why that thinking often sets us on a course of perpetual disappointment.

The author examines, with great affection and an incisive wit, an eclectic range of occupations: from rocket science to biscuit making, accountancy, entrepreneurship and art. Each occupies a discrete chapter, making the book easy to dip into without losing track of the theme.

De Botton sets the scene with Cargo Ship Spotting (like trainspotting, a particularly English past-time). This chapter tracks the journey of The Goddess of the Sea, a grey and orange Mitsubishi built leviathan stacked high with steel containers, from Asia to the Port of London. He conveys the sense that this event, though leaving no trace in the public mind or attracting attention from anyone beyond its participants, is nonethless worthy of record:

“The Goddess docks at Tilbury container terminal at just after eleven. Give the trials she has undergone, she might have expected to be met by a minor dignitary or a choir singing ‘Exultate, jubilate’. But there is a welcome only from a foreman, who hands a Filipino crew member a sheaf of customs forms and disappears without asking what dawn looked like over the Malacca Straits or whether there were porpoises off Sri Lanka.”

The cargo ship spotters in their waterproof jackets at the end of the pier are not dissuaded:

“They wish only to admire her and note her passage. They bring to the study of harbour life a devotion more often witnessed in relation to art, their behaviour implying a belief that creativity and intelligence can be as present in the transport of axles around the tip of western Sahara as they are in the use of impasto in a female nude. Yet how fickle museum-goers seem by comparison, with their impatient interest in cafeterias, their susceptibility to gift shops, their readiness to avail themselves of benches. How seldom has a man spent two hours in a rain-storm in front of Hendrickje Bathing with only a thermos of coffee for sustenance”.

The men at the pier set up the author’s theme; they are his inspiration “to attempt a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.”

The work of Logistics, the subject of the next chapter, is a truly modern creation. The chapter explores the disconnection of the modern consumer from the manufacture and distribution of goods, a process of alienation that has stripped us of opportunities for wonder, gratitude and guilt, in the process of our consumption. In a poignant and very funny photo essay, he follows the path of a particular tuna over 52 hours from its capture by line in the Maldives, through a processing plant, by air cargo to London, through a warehouse in Northamptonshire, to a supermarket in Bristol, to the kitchen of the woman who stops at the fish counter and buys the tuna steaks for her son’s supper.

In Career Counselling, the author recounts the origins of the relatively modern notion that work should be synonymous with fulfilment. He points out that most of us are working at jobs chosen for us by our 16 year old selves. After several sessions counselling an in-house tax lawyer, the career counsellor makes the following observation (which some of us may find comforting):

“the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him was the idea that ought somehow, in the normal course of events, have intuited — long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms — what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true ‘calling’. … [this notion] was prone to torture us with an expectation that the meaning of our lives might at some point be revealed to us in a ready-made and decisive form, which would in turn render us permanently immune to feelings of confusion, envy and regret.”

Many of the scenes in the Accountancy chapter will be painfully familiar to those who have worked in large law firms. It follows the day of a senior employee in an international accounting firm. One of the few cruel observations (saved by its humour) in the book is reserved for the Chairman of the firm, who manages to respond to each of De Botton’s questions in management-speak platitudes.

Other chapters consider, with humanity and wit, a man who has spent the last 2 years repeatedly painting the same oak tree under a range of different lights and conditions, a Japanese television company firing a satellite into space from the jungles of French Guiana, the manufacture of a “nauseating variety of biscuit”, a symposium of inventors and the laying electricity transmission lines.

Choosing a book about the joys and perils of work, to read for leisure, may sound perverse. It manages not to be, largely because of the lightness of touch in his prose, and his insight.

That there is beauty and dignity in human industry, may be of little comfort to you when toiling away at midnight preparing the next day’s case. But this book deserves to be one of those that you choose to fill a precious, reading-for-pleasure moment.

Tracy Fantin

EQUITY CHAMBERS