Surveillance

by Jonathan Raban

Book Overview

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Bad Land comes a novel that is "as atmospheric with vague menace as a Hitchcock thriller" (The New York Review of Books).

In the not-too-distant future, no one trusts anyone and everyone is watching everybody else. America is obsessed with information and under siege from an insidious enemy: paranoia. National identity cards are mandatory, terrorism alerts are a daily event,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400033659
• ISBN13: 9781400033652
• Release Date: February 2008
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

You said you wanted closure

This is not the book I would recommend for readers to new to Jonathan Raban's work, but it is a deftly and humanely worked out story of post-millenial Seattle. I give it five stars specifically because it flouts a rule strictly enforced in writing workshops and book groups across the county (not to mention in the minds of people who think that Hollywood actually produces art): "Surveillance" fails to conclusively conclude. One can tell by the reviews here that doing so is akin to speaking heresy. I could make an argument that the conclusion is rather too conclusive, but let me simply say that the events of the ending are rather too possible for those of us on the West Coast. They are also are in key with some of the atmospherics along the way, and so document to a degree the worries of a typical liberal imagination in these times. Until the ending, Surveillance quite skillfully inhabits the world of the well-made novel, weaving four(and more) stories together gracefully, each of which changes perspective on the topic as whole. Particularly impressive is the portrait of Alida, Lucy Bengstrom's eleven-year old daughter, who is individual enough to stay in the mind, but with nary a speck of preciousness. But it is in the portrait of Lucy that "Surveillance" succeeds the most. "Waxwings" was mostly the story of a professor with an age and opinions close to Raban's, but Lucy is a 50 something single mother whose certainties and confusions ring true. Ultimately, each of the major character is compelling, even Augustus Vanags who most readers will want to see as a plagiarist if not worse, but is treated sympathetically. If there is a flaw or a contradiction in "Surveillance," it is that ultimately the dread that the novel so effectively evokes is not really a result of surveillance. The forms of surveillance in the novel turn out to be more talked about than realized, constitutive of gossip and not really a "carceral state" as Foucault has predicted. There is dread in "Surveillance" and dis-ease, but the reason for it is deeper, suggested rather than discussed. This effect, however, may well be the intention of the novel, which clearly emphasizes human, rather than electronic, relationships.

It pays to be paranoid.

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 an

Brilliant characters, lousy ending

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 embarrassin