Seven months – a pretty reasonable
turnaround for a review if you ask me. Of course, no one asks me. I’d be worse
at hitting deadlines than Karl Ove Knausgaard, of whom most definitely more
later (much later). But then of course I’m busy binge-watching the autumn
programming on Amazon Prime Video (other content streaming services are
available) and co-managing a chaotic household of at any time up to seven children
(not all mine I hasten to add, and at least I know most of their names, yeah, de
Pfeffel?). I’ve also been quite absorbed by banging my face into a coffee
table at the incredible contempt the British people seem to have for politicians
who appear to have morals and integrity, and their ability to be won over by a
man whose own contempt for the common people caused Stewart Lee to append quite
a few pseudonymous adjectives to his already ridiculous name; Boris Piccaninny
Watermelon Letterbox Cake Bumboys Vampires Haircut Wall-Spaffer Spunk-Burster
Fuck-Business Fuck-The-Families Get-Off-My-Fucking-Laptop Girly-Swot
Big-Girl’s-Blouse Chicken-frit Hulk-Smash Turds Johnson*.
Oh my, oh my.
So, back to the business at hand and to
a book about demonic internet trolls.
No, not really, although the titular Red
Men, virtual avatars of the board and customers of the grotesque corporation
Monad who appear to exhibit unrestrained narcissism, vanity and peevish
childishness, could be the one extension of the current trend to let rip online
with repressed (and often wholly imagined outrage) whilst thinly protected by
internet anonymity. Instead we have a bit of a quiet but discomfiting polemic
about the nature of reality, about the development of technology and the redundant
primacy of humankind, about our generally tragic hubris, and quite a bit of angst
about lots of other things too – there’s a lot going on in Mr De Abaitua’s
noggin.
In three parts it charts the path of
Nelson Millar, formerly editor of New Lad wank-mag Drug Porn and now corporate
shill for Monad, and his friend, the poet Raynond Chase, through the dizzyingly
confusing world of Artificial Intelligence and the insane project that is
creating a digitized version of an entire town in order to run political and
environmental models using ‘real’ virtual people. Corporate sabotage,
drug-taking, weird pagan imagery and murderous robots collide in a quite
excellent cyberpunk-stroke-literary-thriller, set in a post-millennium near
future and embodying all of the fears and anxieties of an ageing generation of
former Spectrum, Atari and Commodore 64 owners and now worried neo-Luddites (I
speak mainly for myself; I don’t even – EVEN – have an iPhone), concerned over
the abuse of technology to further consolidate power in the hands of the callous
rich/powerful/corrupt (synonyms in many people’s minds). It does have a bit of
a Fight Club-type ending too but I
won’t spoil it for you. Instead, go out and get yourself a copy, and don’t be
put off by the simply terrible front cover. It gets better once you open it.
*Correct as of 29th September
2019 in his fabulous
Guardian/Observer column. He may well have appended a few extra in the
weeks following. I expect Stonking Man-baby will be among them.
(Paid link)
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