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Surveillance: A Novel (Hardcover)

by Jonathan Raban (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Raban (Waxwings) explores the current political climate in this clever, unsettling novel set in a near-future Seattle. Freelance journalist Lucy Bengstrom has been hired by GQ magazine to write a profile of August Vanags, the bestselling author of Boy 381, an account of his childhood as an orphan making his way through the charred landscape of WWII Europe. As Lucy researches Vanags's life, she begins to suspect he has falsified the entire account. When she receives a picture that purports to show the author as a child safely ensconced on an English chicken farm during the war years, she's almost sure he's a fake. Almost. Meanwhile, Lucy's daughter, Alida, struggles with being raised by a single mom; the gay man next door may or may not be dying of AIDS; Vanags's wife is in the early stages of Alzheimer's; and a grim U.S. government escalates its police-state techniques to defend against the terrorism threat. An air of suspenseful dread hangs over every page of this intelligent, provocative book, and when the end finally rolls in, readers will be stunned and, in some cases, outraged. 7-city author tour. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

In this well-imagined tale of terrorist-obsessed America in the very near future, the government keeps citizens in a perpetual state of frenzied fear by staging ever-more elaborate drills featuring professional actors portraying victims of some imagined attack. Cultures clash, and private citizens are as prone to snooping as their government. Lucy Bengstrom, journalist, occasional stutterer, and single mom, succeeds in landing an interview with a famously reclusive author. Despite his hospitality and offer to teach Bengstrom's daughter to kayak, Bengstrom finds the subject of her magazine profile a flawed, unappealing character with repressive political views. Through the Internet, she links to a rural Englishwoman, who offers evidence that this author's best-selling memoir of the war and the Holocaust may be fake. Bengstrom also must fend off advances from her ambitious, immigrant landlord, whose own secrets may be uncovered by a disgruntled tenant. Raban's characters, not the futurist setting, are the real focus of this engrossing novel. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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4.0 out of 5 stars "Democracy is the line that forms on the right,", April 14 2007
By Michael Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   
Set in Seattle, Surveillance is a cautionary tale about the current state of the United States in a post 9/11 life and offers unique perspectives from four characters, each with differing perspectives of the modern world. In Surveillance there's a struggle to cope with the threat of terrorism, government spy networks, greenhouse gases, and earthquakes.

Paranoia seems to be everywhere, with the government always on alert and adding to the urgency, is the fact that the main character Lucy Bengstrom, is anxious to write an article for GQ Magazine of childhood holocaust survivor August Vanags and his book Boy 381. Meanwhile, Lucy's eleven-year-daughter, Alida, a childhood genius, records her mother's movements on a laptop and remains haunted by her grandfather's murder, "shot to death like a character in an Agatha Christie book."

Across the whole from Lucy and Alida lives the HIV Positive part-time actor Tad Zachary, who when not lamenting the loss of his partner Michael, is participating in citywide terrorism exercises produced by the Department of Homeland Security. But Tad is also in the service of trolling the Internet late at night.

A conspiracy theorist at heart, Tad is certain that government is operating a cesspit of reprehensible activity, factions meeting secretly to further their private agendas. Indeed, much of his life has been buoyed along by his breezy conviction that the whole thing was a gigantic hoax perpetuated by a criminal administration on a clueless electorate.

While, Lucy oscillates uncomfortably between being somewhat scared and somewhat skeptical, never quite one or the other, Tad becomes convinced that their smarmy shyster Chinese bullying landlord Charles O Lee is going to triple their rent and turn their beloved "Acropolis" housing complex into a multistory parking garage.

Lucy begins to escape in to world of Boy 381 "better to starve in the ragged costumes of faraway history than to think too much about the present." She and Alida even visit August Vanags and his wife Minna, both of them spending charming weekends at their island home and both ultimately seduced by Minna's exotic French cooking. But when Lucy discovers that August may have lifted a paragraph from someone else's book, her loyalty to this kindly and urbane man is thrown into doubt and Boy 381, she slowly comes to suspect, is a work of fiction, not fact.

The characters play out, each positing the various political positions of today and all of them standing on somewhat shaky ground, just like the earthquakes that threaten to destroy Seattle. Tad is angry, angry with himself, angry at the presidency, angry at the nation, "angry at the century, and at the Halliburton fat cats and the mad Christian zealots." Whilst August presents the other side of the coin, the warmongering survivor of Hitler's regime, August delivers a powerful rendition of what it's like to really live in an age of terror.

The plot of Surveillance is mostly double-sided with the equation involving Lucy, Tad, and Alida forming the core, while the relationship between Lucy, the journalist and August, the subject skirts around the periphery of the story. Raban also has a great ear for dialogue and he flawlessly builds the tension with each chapter, especially as Tad embarks on a campaign to discredit the slimy and underhanded Charles Lee.

The comment by August that "democracy is the line that forms on the right," perhaps solidifies much of what is said in this novel of politics, fear and philosophy, and in the end, Raban delivers a type of cautionary and powerful rendition of a world that is increasingly 'built on a jittery and uncertain ground." Mike Leonard April 07.
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