The Parade by Dave Eggers review: Has a light touch, but it’s stylish and slick, and leaves us pondering

The central image in Dave Eggers’s latest novel, The Parade, is a gleaming road in the process of completion. Designed to connect the urban north and rural south of an unnamed, recently devastated Middle Eastern country, its end will be marked by a grand parade to be led by a victorious general, and heralding, apparently, a new era of peace and prosperity. It symbolises modernity, as the sleek tarmacking machine speeds forwards, levelling and connecting; and yet it also demonstrates the complex relationships between stasis and movement, between east and west, between corporations, indigenous peoples and political parties.

Eggers has always been interested in the ramifications of untrammelled communication. In The Circle, he looked at how an entirely open internet becomes a springboard for a whole host of unintended consequences, bringing to the surface things that should have remained secret, and impinging upon privacies and livelihoods. He has also previously written about the interaction between the American dream and the Middle East, in A Hologram for the King, in which a salesman tries to hawk some holographic technology in Saudi Arabia. The Parade is thematically an extension of both.

In a sense, the new road is, narratively speaking, the plot itself: always moving forwards, stymied at various points, and ending in a manner at once familiar and unexpected. Essentially, The Parade is a duel between the two nameless male protagonists, Four and Nine, its only purpose the completion of the highway. The American construction company, worth billions of dollars, doesn’t allow its employees to know too much about each other: it might get in the way of the job, and therefore profit. This lack of proper names for people and country lends the work a fable-like quality.

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This is also a novel about conflicting approaches to life and work. On the one hand, there is Four, whose nickname (of which he himself is unaware) is “the Clock” because he always does everything to the minute. A company man to the fibre of his being, he is incapable of acting outside of regulations, and only wants to finish his task exactly on time so that the parade can go ahead, and he can get paid and go home to his family. He is the Protestant Work Ethic personified. On the other hand, there is Nine. Long-haired, millennial, and a bit of a goofball, he sleeps with local women, talks, against protocol, to members of various local tribes, and generally acts, in Four’s terms, as an “agent of chaos”. Riding on his quad bike with a purple scarf round his neck, he’s a stereotypical western kid trying to find meaning in what he views as other.

Though the characters are thinly sketched, there are many moments of journalistic detail in the prose: “The soda bottles full of diesel, lined up on the roadside and sold by shrunken grandmothers. The stray dogs and children holding babies. The diagonal plumes of faraway fires. The spent rifle shells. The teenagers wearing mirrored sunglasses and carrying unloaded AKs.” Eggers also writes screenplays, and many of the passages here feel geared towards a film version, the road itself and the mechanised pod that Four drives providing a beautifully cinematic picture in the heat, haze and dust.

The Parade has a light touch, but it’s stylish and slick, and it leaves us pondering the rights and wrongs of progress and intervention. A road brings medicine, but it also bears armies.

The Parade by Dave Eggers is published by Hamish Hamilton, £14.99