re:mote voices: literature

Title: Whole Wide World
Author: Paul McAuley
Publisher: Voyager

With increasing pressure from decency leagues and drives for child protection there is an increasing rise of puritanical thought in Britain - particularly with the rise of the internet and the like. Then there was the InfoWar - microwave bombs are set off, banks are hacked and chaos ensued. A short sharp war, a modern war, where more casualties arise from the riots than the conflict, but computers are wiped, bank balances reduced to zero across the country. From which legislation is passed easily, no longer just parent's groups and the like. Cameras are popping everywhere, intelligent surveillance software is in place.

John is a policeman, he was involved with activities which range from the admin side of police work to hostage negotiations. During the InfoWar he was catching a life with a front line unit, where he was involved in an incident. He was the only survivor. But a death bed report put him to blame for what happened. While investigations exonerated him he was still relegated to a minor computer unit when he refused to retire. From there he is called to collect the computers from a murder scene for investigation. Looking to make this his chance to get out of relegation and back to police work he does his best to help along the homicide inquiry. A murder which involves the torture and killing of an art student that was broadcast across the internet. By a killer who should have been tracked entering the building, but wasn't. John quickly becomes convinced he knows who the killer is, but he is on his own and when no one backs him up he goes it alone. With his chance to repair his reputation quickly crashing down around him as he gets further in.

Whole Wide World is McAuley's most contemporary novel to date, set a few years from now with a character that grew up in the last century and listens to the music of the seventies and eighties. The technology and social environment are pretty much now, but bumped along by a notch. This matches a pattern of his recent work, his previous novel The Secret Of Life being closer to now than his earlier work, though one definitely got a vibe that it fit in to some degree with the likes of Fairyland - the Mars landing which was in the background and the presence of coincident characters. With the feel of the present Whole Wide World takes on more of a thriller/crime feel - the lead a police officer rather than a subversive scientist of some sort. Though with that we have a discredited officer who is on a steady slope, one which leads to the last section of the book where he is surrounded by hackers and has taken a step into McAuley's recurrent Invisible Country.

With the crime thread being the drive one does feel a certain shift from alignment, so that ones expectations from McAuley's work aren't quite being met. Though he does seem to be handling the material well, while also addressing the themes of technology and how they relate to our lives. Doing so without as much of a moralising tone as came across in The Secret Of Life, which for me is a strong step forward. Whole Wide World has a lot to say about surveillance and control and the moralising of certain groups over others in the name of "protection" - something which is particularly relevant at the moment in the UK with the rise of disappearing children and the role that the internet seems to have been credited with their disappearance and the part CCTV has played in attempts to track their last known moves. As a narrative McAuley manages to build WWW till it gains its own momentum, climaxing in a solid fashion, that weighs well with the reader, which isn't always the easiest thing to do after achieving one's aim.

RVWR: PTR
September 2002