The Thing in the Snow, by Sean Adams (268 pages, William Morrow)
In the windswept snow-packed emptiness of a place so remote it can only be accessed by helicopter is the Northern Institute, an abandoned research facility. Its staff has suddenly left under mysterious circumstances, requiring the employment of three caretakers tasked with keeping the six-story building functional.
Sound like your job? No? Keep reading. It will.
The light-hearted novel is a satirical take on the modern workplace, from the mind-numbing and largely unimportant tasks that can disproportionately consume a workweek, to the multitiered and often useless health plans offered by large employers, to mediocre supervisors obsessed with maintaining control.
The supervisor here goes by one name, presumably his surname, Hart. Like his two-person team, Gibbs and Cline, he seems to have come to his job with little information; he doesn’t even have a good sense of where he is, having fallen asleep during the helicopter ride.
All Hart knows is that provisions and instructions will be delivered once a week by helicopter, and that while the work is simple, he has a protocol to follow, and follow it he will, even though he often feels disrespected by underlings who aren’t appreciative enough that he provides them coffee and the opportunity for “light socializing” each morning before getting down to work.
Calling their tasks “work,” however, is a stretch. It is more like busy work — things given a person to do only so they have something to do. One week, for example, they are tasked with sitting in all the chairs in the building, ostensibly to test their structural integrity; another week, they measure the flatness of the tables by seeing if golf balls roll across them. The work is so boring, as are the surroundings, that Hart has trouble keeping up with the passage of time; he doesn’t know how long he has been there or what holidays have passed. The only remotely interesting thing that happens is when one morning Cline looks outside the window on a particularly windy day and spots it: “the thing in the snow.”
It’s unclear what the thing is as, like everything else, it’s covered with snow. But Hart, Gibbes and Cline all agree that it hadn’t been there before. And because of some mysterious “snow sickness” that had befallen former employees at the facility, they have been instructed not to go outside. So they have no way to check it out.
There is only one other person on the premises: Gilroy, a researcher who was part of the previous team and for reasons unknown got left behind to continue working on some project regarding “the cold.”
“Condescending, pretentious, and often outright batty, he’s the kind of person who eschews empathy with such vigor that distaste is not just warranted, it is the correct evolutionary response,” is how Hart, the narrator, describes him. Gilroy knows nothing about the thing in the snow, either.
Nor does the “health specialist” who arrives to administer the team’s regularly scheduled checkups (and haircuts) later. In one of the more hilarious sequences of the books, the health specialist informs them that they are all on the “basic” health care plan, as opposed to the premium or platinum. The eye chart, therefore, only contains five letters, whereas the premium plan has 15 and the platinum plan the whole alphabet. Also, “The thermometer’s readings come only in multiples of three, but we have the option to upgrade to the premium option of whole numbers or the platinum level, which includes decimals.”
But that is just a comic aside. The mystery before our caretakers, of course, is what the thing in the snow is, and how they can find out.
The limitations of the characters and their surroundings necessarily immerse the reader into the blandness of their days; we’re redeemed only by Hart’s occasional dry wit and sardonic observations. But then there are small, strange mysteries that unfold, like cryptic messages Hart and Cline find written under tables. It’s as if the most trivial dialogue from the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was inserted into the TV series Lost.
Meanwhile, because the Northern Institute was a thriving research facility at one time, surely it’s possible that the caretakers are themselves being studied as they numbly perform the assigned rituals this week. Maybe the thing in the snow is a test of their compliance? Or is it something more sinister?
It would be wrong to classify The Thing in the Snow as a mystery or a thriller; it’s much too sly for that, and the author, unlike his narrator, doesn’t seem to be taking any of this too seriously, even when he’s skewering the modern workplace.
What he does take seriously is the cold. A resident of Des Moines, Adams is as acquainted with the miseries of cold as New Englanders are. When at one point the characters are asked if they’d rather have a pay raise or the temperature in the building elevated a few degrees, they opt for the warmth, which is entirely plausible this time of year. The book is droll like that and doesn’t ask much of the reader but to come along for the ride — under a blanket, of course. It’s a pleasant distraction for a couple of winter evenings. B
