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Future history as seen by (and written by) the sociopathic underbelly of humanity.
John Barnes' stories are always engaging. He tosses out “gosh-wow!” ideas and usually situates a Really Nice Guy in the center of his stories as the protagonist. Readers will typically identify and root for his protagonists because they are decent and noble.
This is not that kind of book. The protagonist of this story, Joshua Ali Quare, is a sociopath with no redeeming virtues, and, yet, Barnes still presents him as a human being so we find ourselves attracted to him, and rooting for him, despite the fact that he is a loathsome sociopath whose principle character trait is to do whatever it takes to survive and prosper.
Quare's resume is a the resume of a sociopath. He enlists in the United States Army as a Russian agent. He deserts and engineers an international incident involving the gang rape of native women and the mass murder of the women and his former fellow soldiers. He does freelance assassinations for the Russians. He subcontracts as a mercenary where he nonchalantly “serbs” - rapes - women in front of their family. He terrorizes and murders scientists engaging in a particular area of interest for the Organization, i.e., the KGB after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Because he was inoculated with an experimental drug by the KGB, every 15 years he falls sick, loses his memory and reverses his aging by ten years. As a result, the story opens in 2108, when he has lost memories again. A large part of the book is a retrospective memoir of Quare's past 100 years of sociopathy.
And, yet, it is a fascinating read for a few reasons.
First, Barnes does not dwell on the grisly details of rape and murder. The fact that Quare has “serbed” someone is mentioned but not dwelled upon. In a way, Quare's nonchalance about the subject, his disconnection with the event and/or his perspective that serbing and murder is a technique, make him out to be more of a sociopath but somehow keep him from being entirely evil (although he is.)
Second, Barnes manages to invoke our sympathies for Quare. For example, Quare's father was an abusive drunk. Quare ran away from home at 16 in order to avoid his father, and it is from there that he is recruited by a KGB agent who knows him because his family are Communists, which is explained in a matter of fact way by Quare. On another occasion, Quare adopts a street urchin, mostly because he needed someone to play the role of his daughter so that he could escape a destroyed Europe, but it seems that Quare does care for this person.
Third, Barnes' imagined future is sweeping and horrific. He imagines a Europe that is ripped apart in a technological war of the future. This is also one of Barnes' “Meme War” books, and we see how One True - explored further in Candle - develops from the kind of military technology we seem to be developing.
The most interesting feature of the book for me is its alt-history style. Quare notes that he has different versions of events recorded in his memoirs, which he explains as untrustworthy narration. However, the reader can't help but notice that Bush gets re-elected in 1992, that there is a mutant AIDS plague in 1994, and RFK, Jr. becomes president in 1996. I thought the book was written prior to 1992, which could explain these imperfect predictions of the future by Barnes, but it was originally published in 1996. So, either Barnes was being lazy in not re-writing the book or Quare's history is not our own.
And that is a tip for the big reveal of the story.
What really sold me on this book was the idea of the untrustworthy narrator who might be involved in writing his own story. What if a psychopath wanted to create a world where their psychopathy had the greatest freedom?
From that perspective, the final lines of the novel are chilling.
Let me reiterate that this book is not openly violent or bloody or frightening. It is the implications that an attentive reader has to work through for himself that are nihilistic. Reviewers who recommend against this book because the main character is a rapist are missing the point. Barnes is in now way exploiting the rape; he mentions serbing maybe four times and has two or three scenes where rape is described in an R rated fashion. Barnes is presenting a character of a kind that one can find in any war torn area. If you find the concept of rape too offensive to see the word, then, by all means, stay away, but if you have a normal ability to deal with unpleasant ideas in a generally non-graphic way, you should not let the other reviews scare you off from a worthwhile part of Barnes' collection.
PSB
