Surveillance

The New Yorker

“Topically inconclusive” is Lucy Bengstrom’s ambition for a magazine article she’s writing on the author of a best-selling wartime memoir, and a similar notion seems to underpin this novel, set in Seattle in the near future. Plots are left hanging in a fretful atmosphere of tightening public security and disintegrating private stability. Lucy probes her subject’s story and begins to doubt its veracity; her neighbor Tad, an actor, plays roles like Man Being Dug from Rubble in informational films made by the Department of Homeland Security. While the characters agonize over the war on terror, Raban’s sense of political urgency edges toward bluster and trips up his more penetrating comic agility. But as Tad furiously researches anti-Administration conspiracy theories online, humor and anger yield a sharp picture of the secret gratifications of outrage: “This was being in hate, and Tad, when truthful with himself, had to acknowledge that he liked being in hate. A lot.”

Bob Shacochis

To whom shall we entrust the rendering of this moment and its attendant verities — the artist or the correspondent, the purveyors of fictions or the gatherers of facts? And who gets to play gatekeeper in this game? The question, both plot device and intellectual premise, animates Surveillance, the gripping new novel by Jonathan Raban, a British writer who for years has embedded himself in America, earning acclaim for his fresh-eyed travelogues and journalism.
— The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

Raban (Waxwings) explores the current political climate in this clever, unsettling novel set in a near-future Seattle. Freelance journalist Lucy Bengstrom has been hired by GQ magazine to write a profile of August Vanags, the bestselling author of Boy 381, an account of his childhood as an orphan making his way through the charred landscape of WWII Europe. As Lucy researches Vanags's life, she begins to suspect he has falsified the entire account. When she receives a picture that purports to show the author as a child safely ensconced on an English chicken farm during the war years, she's almost sure he's a fake. Almost. Meanwhile, Lucy's daughter, Alida, struggles with being raised by a single mom; the gay man next door may or may not be dying of AIDS; Vanags's wife is in the early stages of Alzheimer's; and a grim U.S. government escalates its police-state techniques to defend against the terrorism threat. An air of suspenseful dread hangs over every page of this intelligent, provocative book, and when the end finally rolls in, readers will be stunned and, in some cases, outraged. 7-city author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

In a security-conscious near-future, freelance journalist Lucy is writing a story about scholar-turned-hot author August Vanags, whose World War II memoir suddenly appears suspect. With a seven-city tour. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

When the going gets tough, the tough get nosy. And so, in this well-realized novel by veteran writer Raban (Passage to Juneau, 1999, etc.), does everyone else. The time is the very near future, a time when the Department of Homeland Security runs constant anti-terrorist drills around the country and everyone is suspect. Tad Zachary is one of the lucky folk for whom the new tenor of the times has been a gold mine: He gets $1,000 a day to act in DHS videos when "even jobs in retail, the usual standby of the out-of-work actor, were in short supply." Tad's friend Lucy Bengstrom is a magazine writer who hasn't had much meaty work since the downturn, Seattle appearing on East Coast editors' mental maps only from time to time, barring the occasional serial murder; she's been supporting her young daughter, a bright girl with a fascination with Anne Frank, by writing travel pieces. Then the phone rings, and Lucy gets an assignment to profile an elusive retired professor, August Vanags, whose new WWII-era memoir has been making quite a noise. Lucy, professionally disposed to mistrust and question, has fallen under the book's spell: "It was as if Huck Finn had been set adrift in this refugee world of trains, and labor camps, and trudging columns of shocked, exhausted men and women trying to escape." It's fascinating, but is it true? Lucy sets to checking out Vanags's story; her daughter gets some schooling in the world of data-mining courtesy of a whiz hacker; Lucy's landlord refines his dossier on a woman he considers to be good mate material; and the plot thickens. Privacy? There's no such thing anymore. Lucy laments having to poke into people's lives, and Tad brightly responds, "Everybody'strying to spy on everybody else. At least you know you're a spook, which is something. Most people are in denial." Indeed, and most of the spying is of an extremely trivial nature, even as real, and dangerous, events are building. A coolly delivered portrait of the Wired Age, when paranoia rules and truth is at a premium.