Alternative Facts

[mtvessel]

Oct 2019
An American Story - Christopher Priest – Gollancz, 2018
* *
A big disappointment, this. I've read three or four previous books by the author and enjoyed his ongoing obsession with intersecting realities. Internet conspiracy theories and the whole concept of "alternative facts" would seem an excellent basis for a story using Priest's particular talents for keeping the reader guessing about what is going on. Sadly this turns out to be a conventional conspiracy thriller, but with very little action and consequently no thrills.

The story is set in a near future in which Scotland has left a post-Brexit UK. The inconvenience of cross-border travel for Ben Matson, a science journalist who lives on the Isle of Bute but has to visit London for work, is described in depressingly plausible detail. But Ben has other problems. Despite having a life partner Jeanne and two children, he cannot forget his great love Lil, an American book publicist who was killed in the aircraft that crashed into the Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks. Only Lil should not have been on that plane and her name was not on the passenger manifest, a fact possibly related to the messy divorce she was going through from husband Martin, a Pentagon official. Ben's memories of her are triggered by two pieces of news. The first is the death of a Russian theoretical mathematician, Kyril Tatarov, who attempted to solve a problem in topological knot theory by means of an equivalence to a (real) sociological theorem positing that if people believe that a situation is real, then it is real in its consequences. The second is the discovery of the wreckage of a jet plane in the Atlantic, close to the American seaboard, in which the CIA and other government authorities seem to be taking an unhealthy interest.

As you can probably guess, this novel is playing with 9/11 conspiracy theories, and this was my big problem with it. For a start, Ben is too credulous to be a plausible science journalist - for example, he quotes an engineer as saying that "steel only starts to sag or distort at about 1,500 degrees Celsius", far higher than the 900-1000 degrees at which aviation fuel burns in air. Er, no. Steel melts at around 1,500 Celsius, but starts to lose tensile strength at around 5-600 degrees, as five minutes of googling will quickly make clear. There are pages and pages of similar arguments, and frankly it's a bit dull. Secondly, if the official story of 9/11 is not true, then something else must be. But Priest is up to his usual tricks of trying to destabilise the reader's sense of what is real, so we never get a clear idea of what this alternative truth might be. Thirdly, the effects of Ben's beliefs on his relationships with his family are not properly worked through. We never get a strong sense of them as characters, so Ben's obsession with his theories doesn't have any interesting consequences.

There may be something clever going on here - perhaps Priest is deliberately presenting superficially plausible but easily debunkable arguments in an attempt to inoculate readers against such "alternative facts" - but the afterword, in which he lists sources for further reading, suggests that this is not the case. Nor was I convinced by Tatarov's character and research, which appears to be based on the notion that the word "theorem" has a similar meaning in both mathematical and sociological contexts. It's a shame because the Thomas theorem, with its implication that it is beliefs rather than facts that determine outcomes in social contexts, is definitely something that we should be talking about in terms of the statements that we should be allowing to spread in the social sphere. But its clumsy integration makes for an unsatisfying novel.