The Old Enemy by Henry Porter

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press on June 8, 2021

The Old Enemy continues and perhaps concludes the story that began in Firefly. While The Old Enemy is the third book in a series, a reader can enjoy it as a standalone thriller.

The novel begins with the murder of a retired and revered spy named Robert Harland. As death is approaching, Harland manages to leave a message for his wife that identifies his killer. Finding the code that explains the message is one of the many tasks that Harland’s old friend, Paul Samson, eventually undertakes.

Before he learns of Harland’s death, however, Samson is busy protecting Zoe Freemantle, who works for an organization called GreenState. Samson has been assigned that task by Macy Harp, the head of the private intelligence firm that is Samson’s employer. Samson doesn’t know why he’s protecting Freemantle, nor does Freemantle know that Samson has been hired to protect her. She might even think he’s stalking her. Samson only knows that Freemantle seems to have a connection to a building that has attracted the attention of government agencies in Great Britain and elsewhere. As Freemantle approaches that building, someone attacks Samson with a knife, but whether the attacker was targeting Samson or Freemantle is unclear.

As all of that unfolds, Denis Hisami is preparing to give testimony before Congress. Hisami is married to Anastasia Christakos. In an earlier novel, Samson rescued Anastasia from a kidnapping and now carries a torch for her. Hisami is about to reveal a major conspiracy that has reached high levels of government in the US and UK, but he’s poisoned before he reaches that point in his testimony.

Samson initially wonders whether Russians are getting even with all the people who played a role in recovering Anastasia from her kidnappers. The murder of Harland and the attempted murders of Hisami and Samson turn out to be part of a more complicated conspiracy. Samson pieces the conspiracy together with the help of his hacker friend Naji Touma, a resourceful young man Samson rescued in Firefly. Samson finds it difficult to pin down Naji to find out what he knows, a difficulty of intelligence gathering that bedevils Samson throughout the novel.

Despite the conspiracy’s complexity, the reader isn’t likely to get lost. Henry Porter provides internal summaries and other reminders of events that are critical to the plot, including important moments from the first two novels. The plot never becomes convoluted. Porter peppers the plot with action scenes without dumbing down the story. Like most fictional conspiracies, this one is driven by money and power. I’ll give Porter credit for crafting a credible conspiracy, or at least one that is more plausible than a typical Ludlum conspiracy.

I also give Porter credit for creating an interesting character in Paul Samson. He has the kind of tortured personality that makes a spy sympathetic. The plot takes Samson to various settings around the world while making clear that “the old enemy” — Russia — is still the one most likely to make serious trouble for western democracies. I don’t know if he intends to bring back Porter in future novels, but he is a worthy addition to the canon of fictional spies who make espionage fiction so enjoyable.

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Alien Day by Rick Wilber

Published by Tor Books on June 1, 2021

Five years after Alien Morning was published, Rick Wilber returns with Alien Day. Alien Morning was a first contact novel. The aliens are the S'hudonni. They look like dolphins, which is a refreshing change from the tendency to imagine that aliens look like lizards or spiders or humans wearing makeup. Other aliens in the S’hudonni empire look like daffodils and ducks. The S’hudonni appear to be benevolent, but bad things happen on Earth before Alien Morning ends. Now Earth is growing grains and grapes and making hand-crafted beer, whiskey, and wine for export to the thirsty S’hudonni empire.

The ambassador/invader from the S’hudonni is known to humans as Twoclicks. He’s the favored son of the S’hudonni empire’s ruler, the one Mother Over All. Twoclicks, or a version of him (a matter transporter makes duplicate copies of whatever it transports) is back on Earth to bring Peter Holman to the S'hudonnir home world, where he is tasked with witnessing and recording peace negotiations. Peter is the primary character in Alien Day, although it doesn’t seem like he will have the chance to make a serious contribution to the story. As Peter is narrating his voyage, the S’hudonni ship is attacked and Peter’s broadcast is cut short. If that were the end of Peter, however, this would be a short novel.

A good part of Alien Day consists of Peter’s narrative account of his adventures among the S’hudonni, including his friendship with Treble (the youngest heir to the throne), and their effort to rescue Peter’s sister Kait, who is being held hostage by Whistle, the ruler’s less favored child. Peter also narrates Kait’s separate adventures as recounted to him by Kait. When Peter isn’t having adventures or writing letters to Earth about his adventures, he has sex with one of the Heathers, who look human during sex but are actually shape-shifting S’hudonni. I’m not a fan of shape-shifting characters (they seem to be popular in romance novels for reasons I can’t fathom) but Heather isn’t a big part of the story.

The plot eventually works its way back to Earth, where Treble gets a tour from Peter’s former-sort-of-girlfriend, actress Chloe Cary, while Peter’s brother Tom encourages anti-alien militias and saboteurs to make trouble for the S’hudonni. Peter apparently represents a political movement although that theme is not well explored. Various attempts to assassinate Treble and/or Chloe and to capture Tom keep the story moving.

Alien Morning was praised for inspiring a sense of wonder. Alien Day trades off the background created in the first novel without adding much that’s news. Middle novels in a trilogy often seem like a bridge, serving the purpose of setting up the third novel without standing alone as a worthwhile story.  The story’s parallel plots  — the struggle between Twoclicks and his brother Whistle for control of Earth’s profits, and the conflict between Peter and the tactics of terrorism adopted by Peter’s brother Tom — seem collateral to the larger story. While there isn’t an abundance of meat in the second novel, Rick Wilber serves readers some tasty action scenes.

Twoclicks is more interesting than the human characters. He comes across as a reality TV star rather than a politician, a star who knows that fame and followers allow a politician to get away with anything. Twoclicks is clearly playing a game of chess, using humans as his pawns, but the purpose of his moves is not yet clear. Readers will need to wait for the third novel to understand the Machiavellian approach that Twoclicks is taking in his relationship with Earth. Given the passage of time between the first and second novels, it might be a long wait.

It’s difficult to rate individual novels in a trilogy because the collective work is what matters. If this novel existed in a vacuum, I might recommend it with reservations. Read as a continuation of the first novel and in anticipation that the final novel will make sense of the whole thing, I’m giving Alien Day a full but guarded recommendation.

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Bonnie Jack by Ian Hamilton

Published by House of Anansi Press on June 1, 2021

Bonnie Jack is a throwback to a time when writers created credible characters in conflict and used them to tell a straightforward story. There is nothing postmodernist about Bonnie Jack. As a family drama, the story is a departure from Ian Hamilton’s crime fiction. Yet Hamilton’s Ava Lee books can be read as family dramas, albeit dramas about a crime family, an Asian version of the Sopranos. Although I wouldn’t call it a crime novel, Bonnie Jack does end with a crime, one that creates a moral dilemma for the protagonist, who must decide whether to make a personal sacrifice to help a family that, four days earlier, he didn’t know existed.

As a young man with a degree in accounting, Jack Anderson got a job with an insurance company and worked his way to the top. His competitive style — legal but cutthroat — earned him the name Bloody Jack, a nickname he detests.

With his retirement date looming, Jack is confronting a new and uncertain life. Perhaps that is what motivates him to finally confront a memory of his childhood in Scotland — the memory of his mother taking his sister to the restroom during a movie and never returning. Jack’s father didn’t want him, so Jack was taken to an orphanage. Jack was fortunate to be adopted by a loving American family, but his abandonment shaped his personality. He doesn’t trust easily. He bottles up his pain and doesn’t share it with his family. He carries a huge resentment of his mother and has never understood how she could have left him in the theater.

Jack now has a loving family of his own, but he has never told them that he was adopted. He decides the time has come to reveal his secret. More than that, he wants to travel to Scotland to ask his sister why his mother left him. After overcoming her shock, Jack’s supportive wife Anne agrees to travel to Scotland with him. During the trip, Jack not only finds his sister, but learns that he has two siblings and a niece he never knew about.

Hamilton conveys Jack’s pain without portraying him as a victim. Jack’s sister offers a sympathetic view of Jack’s mother, reminding us that we can’t understand why people behave as they do when we have not walked in their shoes. Jack is too settled into resentment to accept his sister’s perspective. Anne provides an important bridge between the two siblings, reminding them that their different views of their mother should not be the defining fact of their relationship. Anne’s humanity and the bridge she builds becomes an important factor in a critical decision that Jack must make at the novel’s end.

Jack goes through a tough week in Scotland, particularly after he learns that his father is still alive. A confrontation with his father leads to police involvement. News of the minor scandal makes its way to Jack’s board of directors, creating another stressor in his life. Jack doesn’t handle every conflict as well as he might. But then, neither did his parents. Neither do most people.

Bonnie Jack employs a simple, fast-moving plot to tell a morally complex tale. Toward the novel’s end, Jack is faced with a difficult decision that will test his character, the kind of decision that asks the reader to wonder “What would I do?” Hamilton uses Jack to remind the reader that most people are inclined toward selfishness and self-absorption, traits they need to overcome to realize their full potential as human beings. Hamilton doesn’t preach or pontificate, but in the time-honored tradition of novelists, he illustrates how hard decisions are a test of moral fiber. Readers who are looking for a throwback novel by a skilled storyteller should give Bonnie Jack a try.

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Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 1, 2021

Philosophy, genetics, and mental illness are the building blocks of Double Blind. They rest on the foundation of family, the anchor of all Edward St. Aubyn’s work.

If it is about anything, Double Blind is about relationships. Nature is the setting that informs those relationships — in particular, a country estate called Howorth that has been given over to wilding. If we lived in a state of nature like the deer in Howorth, copulating freely and without attachment might be the natural thing to do. Perhaps it is the natural thing for humans to do when they are not in a relationship, but after relationships form, natural behavior could be too destructive to contemplate. That’s the philosophical question that confounds Francis, whose job is to give tours of Howorth while monitoring the resurgence of species.

Francis’ girlfriend is a biologist named Olivia. Notwithstanding Olivia’s pregnancy, Francis is tempted by Hope’s repeated offers of sex, beginning when they swim together in the nude. Nudity should be natural for Francis. He’s a naturalist who is restoring the cultivated fields of Howorth to their natural state. Nudity seems to be Hope’s preferred state — she sheds her clothing whenever she’s alone with Francis — making temptation, in the form of “grasping at Hope,” a force of nature that Francis struggles to resist.

Another key relationship involves Olivia’s friend Lucy Russell, whose bright future is threatened by a brain tumor. A venture capitalist and fund manager named Hunter Sterling persuaded Lucy to move to London and run a venture capital firm that focuses on science and technology. Since the offer gave Lucy an excuse to leave her rich American boyfriend, not much persuasion was needed. Lucy agrees to stay in Hunter’s London flat while she’s getting situated. Hunter is usually elsewhere, indulging in his cocaine-fueled life of megalomania. Hunter’s “love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself” until Lucy gave him cause to alter his perspective.

The final relationship of importance involves Olivia’s adoptive father. Martin Carr is a psychotherapist whose fascination with a schizophrenic patient named Sebastian pushes him toward his ethical boundaries when he begins to suspect that Sebastian, who was also adopted, might be related to Olivia.

An odd but amusing subplot involves the Catholic Church’s relationship with Lucy and Hunter. Lucy is developing a project called Brainwaves. The project scans the brains of people who are in a desirable state of mind and attempts to reconstruct those states in others using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. A Cardinal has tasked a Franciscan Abbot named Father Guido with making money from a brain scan of “the greatest mystic of modern time.” Using Brainwaves technology, the church plans to market a helmet that will stimulate the mystical centers of the brain by replicating the mystic’s brainwaves. Father Guido provides some comic moments as encounters and inadvertently enjoys a world that is foreign to his ascetic life.

When St. Aubyn isn’t developing relationships, his characters indulge in far-ranging discussions about the mind and the natural world. They talk about mental illness and genetics, the efficacy of psychotherapy, the relationship between socioeconomic status and the mental health diagnosis one is likely to be given, theories surrounding the development of consciousness, the nature of science (“Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around,” Hunter opines), the tension between determinism and freedom, and the potential of immunotherapy as a cure for cancer. St. Aubyn advances a number of interesting thoughts, including the semantic use of “side effect” to “pretend that among the range of pharmaceutical effects caused by a medicine the undesirable ones were somehow incidental.” I also liked the notion that “experience accuses science of being reductionist and authoritarian, while science dismisses experience as subjective, anecdotal, and self-deceived.”

St. Aubyn tosses out dozens of well-formed thought pearls, many of which would make intriguing essays, but can they sustain a novel? The plot scatters its threads, never weaving them into a tight story. Digressive paragraphs about population biology and genetics go on for pages, interrupting any momentum toward telling a story.

The characters generate enough family drama to sustain two or three novels, but the drama gets lost in the swirl of ideas that St. Aubyn uses as a substitute for storytelling. The plot eventually reaches what seems like an arbitrary stopping point, leaving every thread dangling. The result is disappointing. Working intellectual intrigue into a plot is always welcome, but not at the expense of abandoning the plot, as if the writer realized that none of the stories he started were really worth telling.

And maybe they aren't. Francis' potential affair is hardly groundbreaking fiction, while Martin's therapeutic relationship with a possible relative of his adopted daughter seems a bit contrived. The Brainwaves subplot seems better suited to a science fiction comedy. Maybe St. Aubyn decided to plow all the plot threads under and let the story grow as a wilding in the reader's mind. Only the hapless Abott struck me as an original character, but St. Aubyn has enough talent to have grown his other story fragments into a literary garden if he had set his mind to it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Version Zero by David Yoon

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on May 25, 2021

Recent novels are targeting big tech, often with good reason. We Are Watching Eliza Bright explored misogyny in the male-dominated tech industry. Version Zero takes a broader, less focused shot at the supposed evils of tech businesses. Unfortunately, the plot becomes too scattered to score a direct hit on the target.

The story begins with a well-defined evil. Max Portillo, an American of Salvadoran parents, works for a social media company called Wren that is a thinly disguised Facebook. His creative approach to problem solving gets him invited to participate in a high-level working group, where he learns that the company has a plan to acquire even more information about its users and to sell that information to the CIA, the Russian government, and any other buyer that can pony up billions of dollars. Max makes a naïve but well-intentioned effort to bring his ethical objections to the attention of the CEO and is fired for his trouble. Not only fired, but his career is destroyed to send a message about defying a powerful employer.

Max’s best female friend, Akiko Hosokawa, still works for Wren. She helps Max conduct a bit of sabotage that drives users to close their Wren accounts, but only temporarily because who can live without Facebook? So Max conducts a slightly more effective bit of sabotage using a group called Version Zero. The group initially consists of Max and Akiko and Max’s best male friend, Shane Sataw, who is also Akiko’s boyfriend. Shane is a decent guy who cleans pools for a living and doesn’t know or care much about the tech world. He exemplifies one of the novel’s themes — it is possible to live a satisfying life without the artificial ego strokes that come from getting “likes” on the meaningless social media posts that distract us from a world we can’t see because our eyes on glued to our smartphone screens. That’s a more amorphous harm than the novel’s initial complaint — the loss of privacy that occurs when big tech justifies stealing our data by pointing out that the fine print in user agreements pobody ever reads allows them to do whatever they want — but it’s still a valid concern.

Version Zero’s antics come to the attention of Pilot Markham, a wealthy tech innovator who dropped out of public view three years earlier after his daughter died. Pilot blames internet trolling for his daughter’s death. He also blames himself and the internet’s enablers. Pilot befriends (or manipulates) Max, Akiko, Shane, and his 18-year-old neighbor, Turpinseed Brayden. Brayden’s voice represents the average young internet user who feels validated by the feedback he gets from friends on social media posts. Brayden isn’t overly bright but he’s harmless and fundamentally decent.

The novel’s plot follows Max and his gang as they conspire with Pilot to wake up the world to the perceived damage caused by the internet. One of their better schemes involves doxing trolls, exposing the real identities of white supremacists and misogynists who use the comfort of anonymity to post vile screeds about Jews or blacks or women or Asians or immigrants or whomever they happen to be hating today.

The story eventually brings in four other CEOs from companies that might be the equivalent of Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, and Reddit. At that point, the targeted evil is simply corporate greed and the elevation of profit over consumers, as exemplified by Uber’s business development model (move in fast, ignore all laws, and put out the fires after you’re too big to stop). While greed is another valid target, it is hardly limited to the tech industry. Consumer harm linked to corporate greed is considerably greater in the pharmaceutical and petrochemical industries, to name only a couple of obvious examples.

The plot moves quickly. It is sufficiently strange and unpredictable to deliver solid entertainment. The story adds human interest by developing a potential love triangle involving Max, Akiko, and Shane that challenges Max’s perception of himself as a decent person.

Still, I’m not quite sure what message David Yoon means Version Zero to send. After condemining big tech with a broad brush, the message seems to come down to “internet bad.” The internet itself is just a tool, not an evil entity. The novel acknowledges that marginalized people depend on the internet for support. Organizations that do everything from cancer research to animal rescue rely on the internet for fundraising. Some of us have been liberated by the internet. I have the freedom to live wherever I want (within financial reason) because of the internet. Without it, I’d probably be a Walmart greeter. And while I could keep this blog as a handwritten journal in a moleskin notebook without posting my ramblings for the world to ignore, I don’t think the blog unleashes any particular evil in the world. Heck, I don’t even bother readers with ads, as do some of the amusing blog entries imagined in Version Zero.

But partial disagreement with (or uncertainty about) a book’s message isn’t enough reason to dislike a provocative book unless the message itself is evil. Yoon’s indictment of big tech is well intentioned. The book is likely intended to make people think about social harms that tech businesses cause. Thinking is never a bad thing. Yoon plays fair by acknowledging counterarguments to the anti-tech message and by suggesting that the balance of benefits and harms does not weigh entirely on the side of harms. Putting aside the novel’s lack of a clear focus, I enjoyed the characters and the surprising (if sometimes absurdist) plot twists. Those are sufficient reasons to recommend a provacative book even if I'm not entirely sold on the provocation.

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