Surveillance: A Novel [Hardcover]

Best known for his thoughtful and beautifully written non-fiction - "Old Glory," "Bad Land" - Raban's second foray into fiction captures the reader instantly.

Partly this is because the Seattle-based, day-after-tomorrow novel starts with a horrific explosion involving a children's school bus. But mostly it's because Raban's characters are so instantly, engagingly human.

There's Tad, an actor reduced to playing the victim in Homeland Security drills like that exploded school bus. Unemployment runs rampant in this brave new world of checkpoints and paranoia. He lost his partner, Brian, to AIDS six years earlier. Tad himself is HIV positive, but healthy. Railing at the world, but healthy.

Tad's all-consuming anger - focused on the government - feeds on late-night scarfings of Internet blogs and outraged news. He no longer reads the tame and cowardly "New York Times."

His neighbor and closest friend, Lucy, is a journalist whose specialty is profiles for magazines like "The New Yorker." She has just gotten an assignment from GQ to do a profile of August Vanags, an elderly Latvian academic who has published a blockbuster memoir on his orphan boyhood among the Nazis and in their labor camps.

Lucy is an "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" kind of thinker. Her horrible mother once told her she had blotting paper for a personality. Lucy acknowledges some truth in the statement. And she digs in her heels when Tad rants. Lucy hates the "spreading rash" of sirens and surveillance nearly as much as Tad does, but she hates his obsessional anger more.

"So far as she was concerned, the worst thing they'd done was turn dinner with Tad into a conversational minefield."

Her own anger is largely on her frightened daughter's behalf. "How could you explain to a child that `homeland security' meant keeping the homeland in a state of continuous insecurity?"

Alida, Lucy's sixth-grade daughter, is the most endearing of the three very likable main characters. When we first meet her, Alida is experimenting with irony, and failing miserably.

"Saying the opposite of what you meant was cool when it worked, but she had to put a lot of labor into keeping it going, and often, like right now, people just didn't get it. She supposed being ironical was like learning to ski - you had to fall, clumsily and often, before you got the hang of it." The adult world is a fascinating and scary landscape stretched out as far as she can see.

Alida is a math whiz who thinks she alone finds people baffling. "Alida usually succeeded in passing herself off as a normal kid: she alone knew the shameful effort that went into her daily performances, and the risk she ran of being unmasked as a pathetic fake." Lately she's trying to work out an algebraic system that would take in all the variables of human behavior and fit them into a formula she can understand.

Raban gets the pain and joy of being a kid just right - the frustrations with adult evasion and interference, the embarrassing bodily changes, the need for love and the hunger for independence, the delight in new accomplishment, the fear that everyone else gets it and you don't.

Tad is the closest thing she has to a dad, a role he cherishes. So when Alida accompanies Lucy on a weekend to Vanag's island house and comes back bubbling with enthusiasm, he lashes out viciously at Vanag's character (never having met the man). Lucy herself is having some doubts.

It was immediately clear why Vanag's publishers portrayed him as a recluse who gave no interviews. The old man is brash, ebullient and opinionated - way too enthusiastically American - and right wing at that. He's also generous and amiable, with a charming wife and tremendous enthusiasm. But Lucy spots some inconsistencies. Could his memoir be fiction?

Raban draws us fully into the lives of his characters. The chaotic city, howling with sirens, snarled with checkpoints, bristling with barbed wires, Humvees and undercover security, becomes absorbed into the background of their lives, part of its fabric.

And then there's the ending. Unfortunately, to discuss it is to give it away. Suffice to say I think Raban took the easy way out of his story. Though it's undoubtedly the ending he was headed for all along, it's deeply jarring, unsatisfying and disappointing.

--Portsmouth Herald

Jonathan Raban's Seattle-based novel, "Surveillance," is an amalgam of disparate elements: It shows a post-9/11 world whose inhabitants are living in a perpetual state of anxiety. Terrorism is an ever-present threat and government leaders are scrambling to be "prepared," as if this were even remotely possible. A second element is the touching relationship between a journalist and single mom, Lucy Bengstrom, and her eleven-year-old daughter, Alida, who is math genius. Lucy and Alida are very close to their neighbor, Tad, a gay actor who is keeping his AIDS under control with medication. Tad is a paranoid left-winger who trolls the Internet for evidence that America's freedoms are being undermined by right-wing megalomaniacs. He and Lucy often argue vociferously about politics, but Tad loves Lucy and he takes his role as Alida's surrogate father very seriously. The final element is Lucy's encounter with an elderly man named August Vanags, whose blockbuster bestseller about his boyhood during World War II is about to be filmed. Lucy snags an in-person interview with Vanags at his island home, and she soon develops a warm friendship with August and his wife, Minna.

Raban's handles the Lucy plot line perfectly. She is a fiftyish single mother who adores her daughter but fears that her child is starting to drift away from her. Tad and Lucy's new landlord, Charles Lee, is a slimy, greedy, and insensitive boor, and he makes for a loathsome villain. Lee considers himself a businessman on the rise, and he listen obsessively to self-help tapes about how to become rich and masterful. Yet, he is completely clueless about the social niceties and lives a pathetically lonely and isolated existence. All of these characters' lives interconnect in various ways, and the reader becomes invested in their destinies: How will Lucy's fondness for Vanags and his lovely wife affect her ability to write an objective story about him? Will Charles Lee's plan to make his building more upscale result in Tad and Lucy's eviction? Are Tad's wild theories about government conspiracies simply the ravings of an individual with too much time on his hands, or does he have an insider's knowledge of what is really going on?

Raban is a solid author with an excellent command of descriptive writing and dialogue. He does a marvelous job of showcasing the climate and culture of Seattle and its environs, and there are lovely interludes when Lucy's daughter and Vanags bond with one another while chatting, kayaking, and exploring the beach. Because she likes August and Minna so much, Lucy is perturbed when she suspects that Vanags' book might contain more fiction than fact.

"Surveillance" will garner the most attention, however, for its bizarre finale. Not only does the author spring an unpleasant surprise on his readers, but the outcome has little connection to the rest of the novel and provides no closure. This is a shame, since this book had a great deal of promise and Raban could have done so much more with the material that he had set up so carefully. Unfortunately, the conclusion undermines all that has gone before, and it is likely to leave readers more frustrated than satisfied.

Finally, a novel in which the protagonist checks Amazon reviews as part of her research. Lucy Bengstrom, a Seattle journalist interviewing a Holocaust survivor and wondering about the veracity of his best-selling memoir, thinks as she skims its nine hundred Amazon reviews: "It seemed to be part of the house rules that to praise a book you had to manifest an exaggerated response-- laughing until you cried, cracking up, or, as a woman from Akron, Ohio, claimed, wetting yourself, choking for breath, depriving yourself of sleep, as if readers were competing for some emotional dysfunction award." (204) I admit only to staying up late last night, and reading the book thus in two sittings. It flowed faster than I'd expected, and as I had only eighty pages to go at the point I had briefly separated my awareness from the page, I finished it summarily.

Emotionally speaking, happiness remains a will-o'the-wisp for Lucy and her daughter Alida, their neighbor Tad a bitter aging gay actor, August Venags the memoirist and his wife Minna, and Charles Lee-- an Asian immigrant, half-comic and half-sinister as his attempts to woo Lucy as he buys the apartment flat she, Alida and Tad occupy. Without giving away the climax of the novel, he puts notices in the tenant's mailboxes: "Notice of Demolition," and this phrase can stand for this story, set about five years from now. Lucy happens to be the same age I am, so reading this caused me a considerable amount of identification with her! Often, the travails of a writer make for thinly disguised agonies of the real writer of a novel. However, British-born transplant Raban, who I knew only for his early travelogue that I enjoyed twenty-odd years ago, "Arabia," integrates easily his adopted city's Seattle setting into a plot rich in character rather than description. That is, instead of focusing upon the natural beauties of the Northwest, he usually limits his omniscient, indirect first-person narrator to convey what each of the personae I listed above see of this city and the nearby islands.

What they notice tends towards the grim. Global warming leads to torrential rain and spring heatwaves. In a clever detail, cars leave the engines on for the air conditioning as they wait fot the ferry as a security check holds them up; on the ferry a short time later, Alida gives a thumbs-up to the boat's sign boasting its soybean-powered fuel!

The novel, in a scene that I admit weakens the novel's beginning and almost caused me to abandon it (until Charles Lee's entry made me pause and give it a second chance, overall earning more a low four stars or a high three as I think this incident weighs the book down in its early stages), begins with Lucy nearly involved in and eyewitness to a fatal car accident on the way to interview Augie the Latvian child grown U Dub professor and now retired political analyst. Now, most people would take the day off, beg off their engagement (even if it was hard to arrange that meeting with a famous reclusive author), and recoup. But, Lucy heads off with apparently less trauma than one'd expect, and while this may parallel her own brush with death to the many such close encounters attested to by Augie, it appears too contrived. The rest of the novel gathers momentum, as Lucy and Alida befriend Augie and Minna, and as Tad finds himself employed in dramatic enactments of staged emergencies indistinguishable from real attacks that the feds stage without warning in a near-future when neither side has won the war on/as terror.

Augie and Tad although they never meet provide the two polarities about the rationality of this war, and Lucy, although clearly the NPR listening liberal that one would expect of a writer who contributes to "The New Yorker" and "GQ," has therefore a chance to channel both views for the reader. Tad haunts the Net and convinces himself of conspiracies hatched by the Pentagon; Augie passionately defends a neo-con perspective that demands the fight for democracy and thus NPR's own demographic's choices means that eternal vigilance must be the price of freedom. Raban allows Augie's view to be conveyed through Lucy, while Tad's paranoia comes directly from his own mind: a clever touch that keeps the ideas of this novel alive.

The novel does not end tidily, to its credit. Near the final episode, as Lucy continues to wrestle with the truth of Augie's account, she begins to compose the profile on the enigmatic man's tale. "There'd be no bottom to this piece, no key to the 'real' Augie, no problems solved, no pseudo-urbane assembly of Augie in legible, transparent form on the page. Rather, readers would find themselves in the same position as the writer-- perplexed, fascinated, engaged, and sometimes repelled by August Vanags-- just as aware of their own shortcomings as she was of hers, aware that features and surfaces unregister themselves, and that like the writer, they must not conclude." Many reviewers, outraged at the novel's sudden end, may have failed to notice this foreshadowing on pp. 242-3, only a few pages from the dramatic conclusion.

I, too, would welcome a sequel. All the characters will be missed by me. But I am not sure if this would violate the narrative "rules" that the interviewer Lucy and the autobiographer Augie have themselves set up, not to forget the episode of Finn's freaking-out, so to speak.

While this novel may tilt for some more to a novel of ideas, or an Augie and Tad as mouthpieces to express the conflict we share in fighting a war against an often undetectable enemy in a time of sudden disaster, Raban is to be commended for keeping us all off balance, just as his Seattleites find themselves at the climactic event.

How better to finish off a novel about unpredictable times, when despite all the surveillance done personally or governmentally we must remember with a deus ex machina or a quick sharp shock how frail a human body is against the whole wide world? All of these topics, even if imperfectly integrated, attest to human frailty. Raban intentionally or subtly has proven how fragile are the electronic networks as well as the human connections in this novel of a time nearly identical to our own, as Amazon readers and reviewers!

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 25 reviews  2.8 out of 5 stars