Noir
K.W. Jeter
Bantam Spectra, 388 pages
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In a dark, dystopian, near-future world, an operative named McNihil--a specialist in the investigation and punishment
of intellectual property theft--is called in by the top brass of mega-corporation DynaZauber to investigate a murder.
A junior executive named Travelt has been slain, and information in his possession has been stolen.
But not in physical form. As an executive perk, Travelt was given a prowler, a kind of android life-surrogate.
A prowler's purpose is to gather experience for its user's vicarious pleasure--experience too dangerous or fearful
to undergo in one's own skin, such as the sexual fetish and depravity of the district known as the Wedge. But Travelt's
prowler malfunctioned. Transfer of experience is supposed to go one way only, from prowler to user. In Travelt's
case, the exchange was mutual. Now the prowler, with Travelt's personality and Travelt's knowledge inside it, has
vanished into the Wedge. And the executives want McNihil to find it and bring it back.
McNihil doesn't want the job--he's already had as much experience of the Wedge as he needs, and he suspects that
the DynaZauber execs have a secret agenda of some sort--but he accepts it anyway. What the execs don't know is
that McNihil has his own secret agenda, and has deduced a lot more than he was meant to about the real nature of
the lost information. What McNihil doesn't know is that his previous horrifying experience of the Wedge only scratched
the surface--and that the being who waits for him there is more terrible, and more powerful, even than he believes.
There are many kinds of "noir" in Noir. There's the noir of the darkest sides of human nature,
manifested by the soulless DynaZauber execs and the thrill-seekers who frequent the Wedge. There's the noir of
the monochrome, perpetually nightbound, gangster-movie world McNihil's surgically enhanced vision lays across the
ugly world he really lives in. And there's noir in its genre meaning--which is, as one of the characters says,
betrayal. There's plenty of betrayal in this book: of self, of others, of larger units of society. There's lots
of guilt as well--and also a peculiar lack of it. McNihil, with his heavily symbolic name, carries around a universe
of regret about his not-exactly-dead wife and the colleagues who died in the Wedge because of his miscalculations.
But he visits horrific punishments on copyright thieves without a twinge of remorse.
A good deal of Noir is basic cyberpunk: the rootless and disillusioned hero, the trashed cityscapes, the
strange technology gone amok, the corporations that rule like principalities, the modification of human beings
with cybernetics and weird implants (and the tough-cookie heroine, who seems to exist mainly as a plot device).
But, unlike many authors who work in this wrecked-future mode, Jeter rejects the promise of information technology,
which he dismisses as just another effort by the corporate giants to addict the public to consumerism (both consumerism
and addiction are major themes in the book). In his world, "connect" has become the equivalent of a four-letter
word. And there's a satirical edge to his grim inventions that gives them a somewhat different spin. The corporate
management bible is Connect 'Em Till They Bleed: Pimp-Style Management for a New Century. There are executives
who've had their hands modified into tiny squirrel claws so their fingers can scurry across a keyboard that much
faster (no carpal tunnel syndrome there!). Charities have solved the homeless problem by actually welding shelters
onto vagrants' backs (with, of course, advertising on the shelters' sides). While arresting a suspect in a movie
theater, McNihil views a Disney-style family musical about a teenage Jack the Ripper, complete with singing and
dancing body parts as Jack's helpful chums.
Noir seems to drift a bit in its early chapters, with episodic shifts of place and perspective, and scenes
that seem more like atmosphere pieces than parts of a connected narrative. But in the end all the plot threads
are pulled together, and it becomes clear that each of these separate incidents and elements was necessary to the
story. There's a nice sense of revelation about these final chapters, in which we really do find out what's going
on, and everything really does match up. And for all its annihilating violence, there's an oddly hopeful quality
to the ending, in which McNihil (maybe) gets what he wants, and the human soul, in all its darkness, is revealed
to be far beyond the reach or even the comprehension of the corporate kingdoms that seek to enslave it.
In sum, a rich and fascinating book with considerable depth and many challenging ideas--and beautifully written,
too.
Copyright © 1998 Victoria Strauss
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