It is the coming of this digital age that is satirised and criticised in Factory 19. Dennis Glover, with a Cambridge PhD on the Levellers in the English Civil War, is nothing if not versatile. The son of Melbourne factory workers, this speechwriter and former Labor staffer has produced social criticism, a study of great speeches, and a historical novel on George Orwell. Glover has been a fierce and eloquent opponent of the destructive impact of neoliberalism on the material and cultural fabric, and notably its habit of wrecking economic livelihoods and industrial communities. There is no better Australian critic of the arrogance, mediocrity, and narcissism of modern political and economic élites, or of the deep store of ideological rubbish with which they ply their trade.

In Factory 19, Glover’s particular focus is on the role of digital technologies and tech companies in shredding our humanity and sociability. This makes the book sound earnest, preachy, and programmatic, but it is not. Much of it is very funny. The narrator, Dr Paul Richey, is a history graduate and speechwriter who has had a mental collapse culminating in a spectacular meltdown due to the outrageous demands of an unreasonable boss, one Prime Minister X (the model for whom will be obvious to Australian readers). The footage of Paul screaming ‘Let me sleep, you fucker, let me sleep!’ as he lands on the floor of the parliament before hurling his laptop ‘like a frisbee at the Speaker’s chair’ goes viral.

In the meantime, the city of Hobart has been transformed by Dundas Faussett, a David Walsh-like figure who uses his billions won by working out a system for gaming the world’s lotteries to establish a Gallery of Future Art. Among its many amazing exhibits is ‘The Big Fella’, a six-foot-high penis ‘said to be made of human cartilage and skin, which became erect and ejaculated visitor-donated semen on the hour, every hour’. While GoFA transforms Hobart into a favourite among the world’s wealthiest and most fashionable, Faussett then mysteriously closes the gallery. Hobart is transformed overnight from boom-town into post-digital wasteland – the perfect place for Richey to seek refuge from modern technology. He finds others there whom the digital world has also left behind, and they discover a fellowship of sorts in the revolving restaurant of a disused casino, where they live a straitened existence.

Before long, Faussett is back, but this time with a new and even more outrageous idea. After a lengthy period of secret construction, a massive factory complex is revealed. Faussett and his wife, whom we meet early in the novel as one Bobbie Bellchamber, an unbending enemy of the digital age, have decided to recreate the year 1948. They settle on March. Why? Because in April 1948, the release of the first commercial mainframe computer and the establishment of the RAND Corporation were the beginning of the road downhill. ‘We’re going back a month earlier, to March, just to be on the safe side,’ Faussett explains, ‘the moment in history in which economic prosperity and human contentment were at their optimal mix.’

Much of the first half of the book is devoted to a loving description of Faussett’s project, a recreation in full 1940s technicolour of an ideal industrial community complete with period costume, Brylcreem, and imperial measurements. State-of-the-art products from the 1940s roll off the assembly lines. Warm ale is served in a cosy pub; before long, people are speaking as if they’ve just stepped out of an Ealing film. (The sheer northern Englishness of it all makes Hobart’s recreation of 1948 seem rather more like Bradford or Salford than any Australian city.) Global taste is transformed: the 1940s are back. The enterprise makes a fortune from exporting its splendid products.

Glover has the gift of creating a vivid world and making you care about its fate as well as that of the characters who inhabit it. This is not easy in utopian fiction. The American social reformer Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888) was a bestseller in its day; to read it now is a deadening experience. But there is a humour and playfulness in Factory 19 that saves it from this kind of dullness, even while the book has a serious point to make: not everything in the present is superior to the past; industrial society had its strengths. Factory 19 is not an injunction to return to that past, but a reminder that any vision of a future worth having will necessarily demand what Faussett calls the political act of remembering.