Middle Class Holes 15 - Jolyon Maugham

What does the fox say?

Are we living in a simulation?

The theory goes that computers will eventually - by next Tuesday week, at their current lick - develop the ability to create totally convincing and very detailed virtual realities. If you were one of the bits of data in one of these pocket universes, you wouldn’t know that you were. Everything about yourself and the world around you would seem totally, realistically solid. You’d be a string of data, with only the illusion that it hurt like hell when you dropped a brick - just another little bit of data, after all - on your phantom foot.

The thinking goes that when computers get the power to build these mini-realms that there’ll be millions - billions - of them. So therefore the law of averages suggests that it’s already happened, and that we’re in one. There’d be only one real reality, after all, and absolutely oodles of fakes.

Now, this is a very dividing notion. When they hear it, people tend to react either by saying something along the lines of ‘whoaaa, cool, amazing’ or ‘I’ve never heard such a lot of absolute cock in all my born days’. I tend towards Reaction 2. The use of the idea in tawdry, pulpy nonsense like the Matrix films, and its enthusiastic adoption by cannabis fans and gender loons, sends up a pretty strong Balls Signal to me.

But just occasionally I get an uncomfortable little sensation, a flicker of doubt, when something - or indeed, someone - feels too fictional, too unlikely, too much of a stretch to swallow, just too preposterous.

How can Jolyon Maugham KC, for example, possibly be real? A pompous celebrity barrister who lives in a windmill - really? From the pen of Tom Sharpe or Kingsley Amis, acceptable. But in the solid, jowly flesh? No. He is simply too ludicrous, too extreme, to be credible.

FIGHT THE POWER

First there is the silly name, which sounds like something dreamt up by a tired comedy hack looking to establish a character as ‘silly posh twit of a lawyer’ and being too blunt, over egging the pudding - Jolyon instead of Julian, Maugham with its long connection to legal history and its crusted port drawl of a sound. It’s too much, like a character being called Casper Jonquil Farquharson. You’d wake up the next morning and change it for something less silly-sounding.

And then there’s the personality of the Jolyon Maugham character. This is set at the perfect level for a fictional being - several shades too grotesque for real life, the genuine human foibles pushed over the top.

Let’s examine these foibles.