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Earlier this month in Taunton, Mass., the school board
announced that it would be installing a new electronic
device in school cafeterias. This device would scan fingerprints
of students and tabulate their purchase. Some parents
along with the ACLU are voicing discomfort. Boston Globe
columnist James Carroll states: “For security, or
mere efficiency, we Americans are sanctioning the end
of our right to deny sanction to such invasion. Now, of
course, it is not just law enforcers in the mode of J.
Edgar Hoover who have the capacity to intrude, but also
MasterCard, the credit bureaus, the Google user, the phone
company, the email provider, the airport screener –
and the lunch room cashier in the local school.”
Enter Jonathan Raban, whose new novel Surveillance explores
the contours of a society obsessed with security, identity,
and snooping. His tale of the very near future takes place
in Seattle and Puget Sound. A sinister veil transforms
quotidian venues into purlieus of paranoia and tension.
Things are changing, and even the weather — due
to global warming — brings on the unfamiliar.
Soldiers and securocrats are ubiquitous: “Humvees
were everywhere now — lurking in downtown alleys,
snarling at drivers from the median strips on freeways….”
Checkpoints abound and citizens submit to inspections
which are sometimes performed perfunctorily by bored officials.
On other occasions inspections are time-consuming rituals
in which zealots of the state rummage sedulously through
every article and investigate every inch of an automobile.
Periodic drills utilize actors in simulations of disaster
replete with explosions, smoke, and body counts. “The
administration was in the business of manufacturing fear
and methodically spreading its infection from city to
city. The lengths they went to – setting fires,
showing make-believe corpses to the cameras – surely
went far beyond what was needed to test the emergency
services. How could you explain to a child that ‘homeland
security’ meant keeping the homeland in a continuous
state of insecurity?”
Into this menacing mélange Raban introduces a trio
of appealing characters: single mom and journalist Lucy
Bengstrom, her precocious daughter Alida, and their aging
gay actor friend Tad Zachary. They reside in two rental
apartments in an old building which has just been purchased
by the irritating Charles O. Lee. Lucy is in the initial
phase of a magazine assignment concerning retired professor
August Vanags, who has achieved celebrity due to his memoir
of World War Two. Before long, Tad has reason to believe
that Lee is an imposter. And Lucy begins to wonder about
the veracity of Vanags and his compelling book.
Raban has said that his book is not a thriller but a comedy
of manners. That may be so, but he has also done a pretty
good job of limning an environment fraught with uncertainty.
Profuse surveillance and pervasive enforcers nurture an
order in which genuine security is supplanted by suspicion
and fear. Citizens alarmed by burgeoning threats to our
civil liberties will find Raban’s tale an intriguing
as well as entertaining reflection on that exigent topic.
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