Fiction: Fear at its most aimless oozes through Surveillance, the third novel from British writer Jonathan Raban and the second in his proposed US trilogy.
Several characters inhabit the narrative, which is itself a dense human comedy about truth and lies. Beyond story, beyond subplot, beyond the various narrative twists is Raban's central thesis, here is a society in which nothing, not even the outcome of the meal you set out to prepare, is certain.
Daily life is an exercise in free fall. The action takes place in present day Seattle, a city in which, pretty much like most in the US and everywhere else, is a capsule caught in the aftermath of 9/11. Everyone now tends to wait and wonder, look for answers and hope they aren't forthcoming. It is as if every unsettling phrase J.G. Ballard has written about a society imploding has come true.
Lucy Bengstrom is a journalist whose talent is for long, essay-length magazine profiles. She approaches her assignments with equal measures of forensic detail and dread. Her life as a single mother, fifty and fat, alert if weary, is contained within collecting her daughter from school and going through the motions of preparing to write her articles; the actual writing demands a further effort. Home is an apartment with homely touches. Support is provided by Tad, the gay actor who lives across the hall, and who tends to counter grieving for his dead lover with helping Lucy raise her daughter, Alida.
Raban is good on evoking the less conventional face of family and domestic survival. Surveillance follows Waxwings (2003), in which the central character, an Englishman in Seattle, Tom Janeway, has his life blown apart by a suspicion. His plight takes over the story. Surveillance is different. Raban allows the mood to dictate and that mood is one of uncertainty.
Lucy is losing touch with Alida, who is now 11 and is becoming a different, more secretive individual. The child she never planned on having, but had following a one night stand, has become Lucy's life. As she sees her daughter slipping away and developing into an older, more alien person, Lucy wonders about the profiles she has written, which offer her version of people she doesn't know.
The entire journalistic process comes under scrutiny, not only by Raban but by Lucy who is involved in the production of it. At no time does Raban, who as in Waxwings uses the third person, attempt to direct Lucy into self examination. Instead, she emerges as a lost soul attempting to be content with a personality determined by whatever article she happens to be writing. It is easier for her to research her stories than attempt to unravel her mind.
Of course, there is Tad, who is about as lost as she is. Except he has some sort of local fame as an actor best-known for his role in a television gardening commercial. The two drift through days of routine shopping and professionally related excursions. In the evenings, they retreat to the apartment of whoever decides to do the cooking. Alida appears to have become their shared responsibility. The three are a family unit and seem cosy and settled. Then the new landlord appears, intent on change.
Raban brings his usual range of talents to the task of writing a novel that is a bulletin, an update of life in the US, a society suspended in the aftermath of 9/11 shock. He writes easily, his prose is relaxed, conversational, the observations are as shrewd as are to be expected of a writer whose true home is non-fiction, most specially the travel/reportage genre, as seen in his finest work to date, Bad Land (1997). His first novel, Foreign Land, was published in 1985, yet it took 18 years, and several books, for him to return to fiction with Waxwings, his first American novel. The US has long fascinated him; he settled there in 1990, and although a very English writer, Raban, has been able to balance his obvious interest in America with that rare thing: a cultural understanding. In Waxwings, Tom Janeway was English and therefore an outsider. This new novel moves beyond outsiders; it is about lost souls going through the motions.
For Lucy, having come from Montana - where her mother ran a theatre company largely concerned with satisfying her hunger for starring roles - Seattle was once the promised land. Early in life, when about the same age that her own daughter is at the time of the novel, Lucy had been informed by that same mother: "You know what's wrong with you? You have as much personality as a piece of blotting-paper!"
Lucy's history, which is released slowly over the course of the narrative, succeeds in creating a picture of a real life person who although never that sure of herself has had to become certain in her opinions if only to write her self-defining articles.
Raban is less successful with Tad, who at times edges close to comic caricature. Yet this does not totally weaken Tad's role, as he is the exasperated voice of the ordinary citizen. There is a remarkable sequence in which Tad attempts to present a bottle of wine to Alida's former teacher. Tad is an example of an erstwhile young radical eager to protest at anything, who in late middle age has become aware that protest means nothing because no one listens. There is no doubt Raban set out to write the post-9/11 novel, the catch is that others, most notably John Updike, have already got there. Updike admittedly concentrated on the element that it is "belief" that makes a terrorist. Others such as Claire Messud, Paul Auster and Deborah Eisenberg and Michael Cunningham have looked to 9/11 as an apocalyptic backdrop, but Raban sees it as having shaped life as lived today. In a society in which everyone is a suspect and privacy no longer exists, there is no protection. Some of this is very terrifying, particularly the realisation that in the age of terrorism there is the additional horror of staged disasters.
Raban moves the action along in the form of domestic realism with an edge. Through Lucy's latest assignment, a profile of August Vanags, an allegedly reluctant author who is, in fact, more than willing to be interviewed, she begins to discover the truth behind a much-praised wartime memoir. Her subject becomes overly accessible by reducing Lucy and Alida to house guests at his island home. Instead of writing a piece, Lucy finds she has effectively moved in.
Surveillance is a novel for and about a US in which everyone wants to be American and in which security is the new terror. Even the famously mild Seattle rain has become threatening. At one point Raban has a walk-in part when Lucy notices an older guy, a writer sharing her library reading table. She thinks about asking him to come to lunch, but only thinks about it. For all the conversational ease and digressions, Raban's offbeat narrative is a cautionary one dealing with the upheaval of the crisis known as Now.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Surveillance By Jonathan Raban Picador, 326pp. £16.99
