Jonathan Raban - Surveillance

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Dan Coxon

Surveillance - Jonathan Raban

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The political climate in the US has become something of a cause celebre in the popular media over the last few years, with journalists, novelists and filmmakers attacking the present regime from every conceivable angle. When even Green Day can achieve international success with a Bush-whacking album, then you can be sure that something’s going on in the public consciousness. Jonathan Raban takes a slightly different approach to the subject with his new novel Surveillance, and brings some refreshing new insights along with it - although it’s still not without its flaws.

Ostensibly the story of freelance journalist Lucy, her daughter Alida, their gay neighbour Tad and the bestselling memoirist August Vanags (who Lucy has been sent to interview for GQ magazine), the real star of Surveillance is the world that Raban has created. Firmly rooted in contemporary Seattle – which also happens to be Raban’s home, after relocating to the US from the UK – this is also a work of near-future science fiction, set in an unnamed year that lies not too distant from the here and now.

In fact, the world Raban presents is so similar to ours that you’d be mistaken for thinking that it was set in the present day. Alida spends most of the novel listening to Green Day’s omnipresent American Idiot album on her iPod, and it’s still recent enough to sound fresh and new to her young ears. It’s only the staged terrorist attacks being arranged by the government that give the game away, a daily routine of faked bombings, gas attacks and explosions designed to test the readiness of the emergency services. (Lucy and Alida’s neighbour Tad works as an actor, mainly on commercials and as an ‘extra’ in these staged acts of terrorism.) The US may be in political turmoil, but things haven’t gone quite that far. Not yet, at least.

Whether we see the world of Surveillance as a near-future prediction or an alternate reality where things have spiralled even further out of control, Raban’s intention is clear: to criticise the current climate of fear and reciprocal aggression, and to some extent to satirise the ‘war on terror’. Amidst all this chaos and confusion, however, the novel’s narrative ploughs a different path, following Lucy’s assignment to interview August Vanags, author of a bestselling memoir detailing his life in a concentration camp during World War Two. Both Lucy and Alida become fond of the eccentric old man and his wife Minna, but then Lucy uncovers evidence suggesting that his book may have been plagiarised, and that he may have spent the war years in a farm in Dorset. Is everything he’s written a lie? With a lack of conclusive proof one way or the other, how should she present him in her article? How can she reach the real truth, and the essence of August Vanags?

It’s these questions that Raban circles around, and which feed artfully back into his main conceit. The title gives us a clue to his intentions: here is a novel that deals with the act of watching other people, and with the difficulty of making judgements about truth and honesty when the world is only painted in shades of grey. The intermingling of these story threads to serve the one purpose shows a literary master close to his best, but ultimately the ending of the novel lets him down. Perhaps it’s in the nature of the questions Raban asks, but he adamantly refuses to offer any answers at the book’s conclusion, instead leaving his inquiries – and his characters – hanging, almost in mid-sentence. Given the subject matter it may be the only way that the novel could end, but it’s deeply unsatisfying to the reader, and ultimately threatens to undermine everything that’s gone before.

Fortunately the writing is strong enough to withstand this derailing, but it makes Surveillance a good novel rather than a great one. It still stands out from the cacophony of voices arguing against the Bush regime, thanks to its intelligence, wit, and its willingness to look at the bigger picture rather than simply blaming the world’s woes on one man, but its dissection of the current atmosphere of fear is no less sharp for taking this broader view. Raban may not achieve the international success of Green Day, but his is certainly a voice that we should listen to.

Posted on April 9th, 2008.

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