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.
Review by JOE MARTIN, Contributing Writer
Book: Surveillance By Jonathan Raban, Pantheon, January 2007, Hardcover, 272 pages, $24