Publisher's Synopsis
Meet U. - a 'corporate anthropologist' pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London; an uneasy node in giant networks of global capital and intellectual exchange whose overall shape seems destined to elude him. U.'s employers have set him two tasks. First, he must assist in the launching of a great, epoch-defining project which no one, least of all its own architects, fully understands. Second, he has been asked to compose the seemingly impossible: the Great Report - an ethnographic document to sum up our age. Instead, procrastinating, meandering, drifting through endless buffer-zones of information, U. grows obsessed with the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there a secret logic holding all these things together - a codex that will unlock the master-meaning of our times?
