Regis is at the bottom of his class and should be taking Metaquine. This drug has the capacity to change difficult children into model pupils, assures its manufacturer, the multinational Globantis, a world leader in psychotropic drug manufacture. Psychological tests (sponsored by the company, of course) will soon be picking out pupils who could benefit from the treatment. Regis will certainly be one of them.
Curtis, who presides over the future of Metaquine, is in seventh heaven. Ever since the product started transforming schools into hothouses for geeks, Globantis stock has continued to rise on the stock market. Not only that, but promising new qualities have been found in the active ingredient. There are a few opponents to this optimism, such as Clotilde, who is against the use of psychotropic drugs in schools, or Sophie, a retired neuro-scientist and a tireless campaigner. But what can these idealists do against the might of Globantis? Can they condemn the biased reports and the bragging publicity? It’s a waste of time; the propaganda has become part of everyday life.
If only Regis could count on his family for support. But his mother, Aurelia, hooked on virtual reality games, wears a VR headset night and day. And his step-father, Henri, comes home from work and fantasises about serial killers as he reads grim tabloids.
Regis finds refuge in only one place: in the world of his dreams. Dreams that replace reality with mythical beasts, castles and invisible gaming companions. Dreams that can open doors, change the world, tame monsters, increase awareness. Amenable, cosmic, magical dreams.
Boundless dreams that will soon be destroyed by Metaquine®.
Volume 1, Indicators
1. Clinical data
2. Composition
3. Properties/Effects
4. Indicators
5. Dosage
6. Usage
Pharma
derailed
Illustrator, critic, essayist, writer and... pharmacist, François Rouiller bounds
strongly into the ring with the double-volume Métaquine®. An abundantly multi-faceted
novel which dives into the consciousness of a fistful of recurring characters,
all linked distantly or more closely to a new drug with previously undocumented
properties, developed by the pharma giant Globantis. There's a mother in the
terminal stages of cyber-addiction sealed in the great virtual community where
reality appears incongruous. Her persecuted, dreamy son. A manager greedy for
profit. An old neuro-scientist seeing warning signs in the properties of a "drug
that can change hyperactively naughty kids into eager little angels" and that
no-one can do without. These many in-depth characters flesh out this terrifying
future. The whole novel written in an edgy well-worked style. It's dense,
profound, ambitious and eloquent: incontestably a major new landmark in French-Swiss
science fiction...
Thierry Raboud
A drug that calms down turbulent, undisciplined or headstrong children: dear mum, dear teacher, isn't that ground-breaking? At last, peace in the classroom or after a day's work, aggressiveness quelled and an improvement in results... Métaquine promises all that and more.
Métaquine sounds like Ritalin (a psycho-stimulant) or Ketamine (an anaesthetic and hallucinogenic), two drugs that actually exist. François Rouiller plays with the numerous properties of these much-discussed drugs in order to invent his own. Six characters find themselves in different ways encountering the miracle product and these six voices go to make up an excellent polyphonic novel.
First of all Regis, by his very nature the best test subject: a completely spaced-out prepubescent; he spends his lesson pretending he's in another world, the Duchy, with two brilliant friends. Gifted and self-taught, he is picked on by both the other kids and the teacher who has by now had enough of this dreamer. Aurelia, Regis' mother, is beyond spaced-out, being stuck in SimDom: she's a cyber-addict whose brain, disconnected from her body, lives on autonomously. For everyone else she is just a vegetable. Henri, the geek no-hoper, has taken in Aurelia and her son. It would be an exaggeration to say he looks after them, since he's not really capable of looking after himself. Sophie, a retired doctor in neuro-science with the beginnings of Alzheimer's, is Regis' neighbour, the only one who talks to him and vice versa.
Curtis is the marketing manager at Globantis, the company commercialising Métaquine. Clotilde, a councillor and campaigner, is looking for ways to bring him down...
Another voice makes itself heard and it's Ferdinand A. Glapier. We're not quite sure who he is but what we do
know is that he's a licensed agitator, a cyber-thinker absolutely set on stirring
up public apathy.
Stirring it up? Yes, because we are all anaesthetised by publicity,
lies and marketing. They condition us to make us accept anything and elect the
worst type of thug. And what would we not do to help our offspring get good
marks at school and not bother us at the weekend? Don't worry; François
Rouiller isn't after us, brainwashed citizens that we are. He is condemning the
all-powerful nature and cynicism of the pharmaceutical groups who, under the
pretext of philanthropy, finance medical research but cut the grants to whoever
doesn't toe the line. Who offer to test students who are failing at school,
after having organised vast marketing campaigns directed at families and child
psychiatrists ready to try out the new miracle product everyone's talking
about.
A pharmacist himself, François Rouiller knows what
he's talking about and shrewdly reveals the fraud. All the characters possess
great depth, rendering them credible and therefore familiar. We recognise the big loser with criminal
desires as much as the poor teenager, not because they are caricatures, but
because they are only human and we understand them. The most difficult to get
is in fact Aurelia, lost in her computer-generated world, but her voice is also
that of a damaged woman. The bad guy in the story, Curtis Candrian, is
fascinating because he is such a cynically clever manipulator.
We pick up their story when the advent of Métaquine seems inevitable. Clotilde
is alone in her fight against the pharmaceutical giant; the researchers in need
of finance seem to have no problems of conscience. But then, here and there,
glitches are starting to appear that herald a few problems: Henri is starting
to see users losing it after a botched repair of their headsets (indispensable
for logging on to SimDom) and Regis notices his imaginary Duchy is being
invaded by simulations he hasn't generated. And then there is this picture, which keeps
turning up in different places - at Globantis, in Sophie's home - of a place
that Regis and Clotilde recognise as the old La Guillanne orphanage ...
My only
criticism of this first volume would be that the plot takes a long time to get
going. This works in favour of the characters, of course.
François Rouiller drives his point home through the
words of Glapier between each part of the novel. The cyber agitator, not
mincing his words, attacks big pharmaceutical groups, corrupt policies and
universal stupidity. Isn't it true to say that we've already given up on our
brain before we've even started to take Metaquine? That we're all suckers
voting for thieves, that we've abandoned our pride and our intelligence just to
"look like" something? Look cool,
younger and thinner, look more like the fantasy peddled by ads and the cinema?
If we can be manipulated to such a great extent, it is not so much thanks to the publicity people, the politicians and other gurus that we'd like to shoulder the burden of our stupidity. It's much more that, in the name of illusion, we have rejected the ability to use our capacities to the full. We are subjugated to success, money and youth, in short, appearance. This supremacy of the image is encouraged by the media and makes it easy for the pharmaceutical industry to realise its ambition of not only supplying treatment and medication, but also of getting rich and making their shareholders rich too. All our individual consciousness (or what's left of it) needs to do to shake off the yoke is to say ‘no'. Refusing Metaquine means you accept that you are weak, a dreamer, ugly or just different. It's accepting being you.
This book is really ingenious! Read it!
Mes Imaginaires