Surveillance

Finally my Independent review of Jonathan Raban's Surveillance appears, after "a bit of an editorial kerfuffle", as they say in Little Britain. They commissioned an earlier review, but still ran mine, which I'm very happy about. I ran the full review here on the blog, and I got a very welcome short mail from Raban himself:

How I wish they'd published your review of Surveillance, rather than "the other guy's"! Thanks for the thoughtful and constructive reading.

Glad to let him know that it made the paper - the full unedited review is still on extended post.

Jonathan Raban
Surveillance
(Picador, £14.99)

Reviewed by Pat Kane

In an era where we can access any ‘current affair’ from a thousand different viewpoints – the blog comment, backed up by the YouTube clip, discovered in the e-mail newsletter, that eventually makes onto SkyNews – one feels like cheering wildly for an old-fashioned ‘social novel’ like Surveillance. To sit for a day or two with an artful, humane narrator like Jonathan Raban, and quietly share his concerned gaze at an America gone nearly mad with terror-dread and paranoia, is time well-spent.

This is the second in his trilogy of ‘Seattle’ novels, the first being the dot-boom threnody Waxwings, and by now it’s clear how Raban wants to filter the maelstrom of this United States of Insecurity. Our guides will be struggling writers, artists and intellectuals, counterpointed by a variety of driven refugees from what Eric Hobsbaum once called the ‘age of extremes’, all of them trying to work and love in the Big Drizzle. If this sounds a little predictable as a vantage point, a bit Amis-and-Franzen-ish, then Raban’s essential respect for his rounded characters redeems Surveillance’s slightly privileged, bourgeois-bohemian locus.

The novel begins with a bravura description of what looks like an urban terrorist attack – a dirty bomb exploding under a school bus in the streets of Seattle – but turns out to be a training simulation, a “TOPOFF”, one of many public spectacles put on by the State department to chasten the citizenry. We view the half-hearted maneouvers and rivers of fake blood from the perspective of Tad Zachary, an underemployed actor making his living from these events, whose self-loathing is further fuelled by his relentless web-surfing of anti-American blogs and news streams.

Yet Tad, who’s gay and mourning his deceased HIV-positive partner, is also the loving head of his elective family unit - Lucy, a precarious profile writer for upscale magazines, and her i-pod-enveloped yet spirited daughter Alida. In a climate where panicked evacuations of sports stadiums, the banality of commuter autogeddon, weirdly-costumed covert policing and even good old-fashioned earthquakes constantly threaten the characters’ equilibrium, Raban does a beautiful job of showing how ‘doing family’ can survive any tremor, natural or human. 

But the motor of the story is Lucy’s commission to write a GQ profile on the elusive August Vanags, a retired Latvian professor who’s penned a best-selling memoir of his time scrabbling for survival in wartime Poland. Like Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Raban reaches for the Second World War as an experience of terror, other-fear and catastrophism that might illuminate our own post 9-11 pathologies.

Yet Surveillance uses this, appropriately enough, as an excursus on lies and detection: how could this chirpy, untroubled Grey Panther really be capable of writing a memoir which describes rats crawling out of dead men’s bellies, or Nazis throwing infirm elders out of windows? And for Raban’s fitful liberals, Vanags is even more challenging, as he rigorously argues taking the Western side in the clash of civilisations, a neo-con patriot to a fault.

Using not so much the tools of surveillance, but the tools of sousveillance – the Google search, the troll through Amazon reader comments, the e-mailed scan of an old photograph – Lucy finds enough evidence to make her doubt his veracity. Meanwhile, an increasingly enraged Tad is using the web to discover the real identity of their scary Chinese landlord Mr Lee – a homo economicus who derives his philosophy entirely from biographies of Wal-mart founders and Who Moved The Cheese?

Raban has enough fidelity to his characters, and to reality, to leave them in delicate states of indecision at the end of the book. To be honest, I would have liked his Dickensian sweep to have included at least one well-developed example of an Arab or Muslim sensibility living under such a nervy, suspicious polity (the only such character presented is a mere urban cartoon) – something which we might hope for in the third book.

But the considerable stylistic pleasures of this book are an irony in themselves. Remember all those paranoid postmodern conspiracy fictions we used to devour from the 60’s to the 80’s – Pynchon, Ballard, DeLillo? Well, now all it takes is a classical realist in Seattle to walk the streets, watch the news, listen to the conversations, and you get the same effect.

Surveillance is as useful and eloquent a meditation on the extremism of the present as you would wish to curl up with on a long weekend. And for that small comfort in the midst of pervasive discomfort, we should give Raban thanks.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (Macmillan).