I You We Them, Volume I: Walking into the World of the Desk Killer
By Dan Gretton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020

The prominent nominal subject of Dan Gretton’s big, important new book I You We Them: Walking into the World of the Desk Killer is that colorless class of murderous bureaucrats, the facilitators of horror who put on their hats and coats and the stroke of 5 pm and head home grumbling about the regional supervisor’s upcoming visit to the office. These are not the spotlight monsters the world - and world courts - tend to remember but rather what Gretton calls “desk killers”:

Those I’ve investigated killed hundreds, thousands, even millions of people - yet none ever killed directly, with their own hands. From their desks, from their computers, from their mouths came words, memoranda, orders, reports, which meant that numerous people were killed. These people would argue that there may not have been an intent to kill. Yes, people died, yes, it was extremely regrettable, but they were part of a system, a large organisation that was involved in war or politics or trade all in extremely challenging circumstances.

But readers of I You We Them won’t be too many pages into the book’s 1000 pages (volume 1!) before they realize that Gretton is doing something more generous and more complex than simply chronicling the noxious anonymity of desk-killers - more generous, more complex, and therefore necessarily more daring, more open to looking either distracted or self-indulgent or both. Gretton himself and his life-long friend “J.” soon appear in the narrative and often occupy center stage for long stretches. We see their school days together, and we watch their relationship develop, mainly through a sequence of long walks they take together in all places, in all the stages of their relationship, over decades. It’s a studied gambit, and it isn’t merely laid out as preliminary groundwork. It fills the book substantially. 

William Vollmann did something very similar in his (likewise two-volume) 2018 work The Carbon Ideologies, and Gretton runs the same risks here, mainly that he might seem to be trivializing his incredibly weighty subject by counterbalancing it with personal quotidia, or what may be worse, that he might seem to be condescending to his readers by laboriously reminding them about the day-to-day human world from which his “desk killers” emerged. Are his readers not people? Do they really need reminding that the day-to-day human world exists? 

Gretton eludes condemnation for this gambit in exactly the same way that Vollmann did: by being extremely good at it. I won’t be the only reader who became almost as deeply interested in the progress of those personal interludes as in the investigations of the book’s main subject. The two narrative halves aren’t nearly as firmly or legitimately connected as one suspects their author thinks they are (each should probably have been the sole focus of a single book, instead of being awkwardly conjoined in two books), but in odd and effective ways, each allows the other a little space to breathe.

And ye gods will readers be grateful for that breathing space whenever Gretton does focus on his cast of monsters. When the concept of “desk killers” is explained, most of those readers will automatically think of the Nazis with their nauseating penchant for dispassionate record-keeping, their memoranda about the most cost-effective ways to stuff “items” into a mobile killing-center without overloading its front axle. And the Nazis and their photocopied invoices do indeed feature prominently in this first volume. But the resonances of the more personal half of Gretton’s book bubble through more strongly in connection with a different bit of bureaucratic murder: the Irish Potato Famine, and the damnable sang-froid of Assistant Secretary Charles Trevelyan, who not only let it go on but lied about its severity. “Can you visualize all the letters written from those offices, and the hundreds of memoranda exchanged between Trevelyan and Peel and Russell and Wood?” Gretton asks. “All the judgements made in these grand, panelled rooms with portraits staring down on these statesmen, all the decisions signed off on government paper, stamped with government seals. All the deaths authorised from those mahogany desks in Whitehall.” 

And when contemplating Trevelyan’s bland inhumanity, Gretton allows himself to be momentarily overcome personally - and the moment works in large part because readers have already been extensively prepared for just such a shift:

Another man’s crime. More than a million human beings dying not because of anything they had done wrong, and supposedly part of the ‘commonwealth,’ part of ‘Great Britain’! This is the aspect my brain still cannot process, this is why an inchoate rage builds in me. Everything I’ve grown up with, everything I’ve been taught, tells me that you cannot write like this, you must be ‘measured,’ you must be calm. No. Not this time. Not about this. 

I You We Them carefully uses this tension between the personal and the historical in order to ratchet up the fascination along these two axes. Half the book is both an unsettling historical inquiry and, by not very subtle implication, a warning, a potential indictment of every single person who reads it and who might some day, under pressure, stamp a lethal memo that crosses their desk. And the other half of the book is the oddly engrossing personal story of the man doing the inquiring. The result is completely, confidently fascinating and naturally sets the imagination wondering about what Volume 2 will be like.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.