March 09, 2007
Watching the Watchers
Surveillance. By Jonathan Raban.Surveillance" is a novel of ideas that attempts to capture the flavor of paranoia and tension in America since the 9/11 attacks.
Set in the near-future, where security measures have increased in the wake of more terrorist attacks, Seattle freelance writer Lucy Bengstrom is assigned by GQ magazine to interview August Vanags, a retired university professor hiding from publicity after his memoir about his escape from Poland under the Nazis hits the best-seller list.
But it turns out that August is not as difficult to reach; his seclusion is a publicity stunt. And Lucy has a problem reconciling the happy, garrulous professor with the boy who experienced so much suffering. She hates his politics but likes the man and is troubled when she uncovers suggestions that the memoir is faked.
The theme of watching and being watched percolates throughout the book, as unsettling as the fault lines rumbling under Seattle. Lucy's gay friend and neighbor, Tad, an actor scraping by with commercial work and participating in re-enactments of terror attacks, plunges into conspiracy thinking by trolling leftist sites online and investigates the past of the apartment building's new owner, who wants to upscale the place and raise the rents. The China-born apartment owner, Charlie O. Lee, listens to self-help tapes and closely watches his Mexican attendants at his chain of parking lots. He also installs surveillance cameras in his apartment building, and explores Lucy's apartment with an eye toward making her his wife.
While the English reviewers saw "Surveillance" as an indictment of paranoid Amurrica, there's a lot less here than meets the eye. This isn't the world of "1984." References to terror attacks are so devoid of place, time or context that it seems that Raban is using the theme more as a way of showing how we live our lives rather than scoring political points. Lucy complains about the National Guardsmen who search the cars at the ferries, but except for reminders to get her national ID card, the increased security checks have no other effect on her life. Tad spends his nights fueling his conspiracy fantasies by reading left-leaning blogs. Only Augie, recalling life under the Nazis, seems to make sense. When he hears the country accused of falling into tyranny, he shoots back: "I'd like the ghost of Stalin to come back and rule the U.S. for, let's say, three days ... you don't have the faintest inkling of what tyranny is."
A longtime non-fiction writer, Jonathan Raban flavors "Surveillance" with references to Pilates, computer viruses and racial profiling, and his accuracy extends to depicting people's attitudes in the post-9/11 U.S. But that's it. Instead of resolving these plot threads, he interrupts them by summoning an earthquake. As an effective literary technique, it works as poetry, but this is a novel, and it reminds me more of Michael O'Donoghue's classic advice on how to end books: "Suddenly, everyone was run over by a truck."
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