Sunday, 9th of May, 2004

While I was reading White Devils (which I started as soon as it arrived, it being a new Paul McAuley and all), I was inspired to write very fannishly of it:
Paul McAuley’s new novel White Devils is genius.
And it pretty much is. My excuse for that little outburst was that I was very behind in my book reviews, but clearly I couldn’t hold myself back. Now that I’m here, let’s see how I followed that blatantly silly (and not terribly grammatical) sentence:
Marketed as a thriller, it is that, and thus it’s fast-paced, present-tense, and doesn’t leave a lot of room for characters you grow to know and love, but it’s also pure near-future hard-sf, with incisive scientific and political extrapolation, a very deep moral sensibility, and some fun ideas about cognitive science.

So. Hard science fiction can get blamed for caring too much about the ideas and not enough about creating believable characters, and some of it does do that. McAuley, however, is well and truly capable of insightful characterisation. So when he’s doing the thriller thing, you can be sure that any superficiality of characterisation is deliberate.
White Devils is, very explicitly, a 21st-century Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s harrowing book (I found it a harrowing read - hardly any paragraphs! Prose as dense as the jungle!) explores colonialism and industrialism in the early 20th century, and here we are taken on a similar journey into the heart of the “Green Congo”, in an Africa torn apart by civil wars and biotech plagues, spawning huge numbers of refugees and atrocities.

Nicholas Hyde (yes, his surname, like the Conrad references, is a little too deliberately over-heavy with connotation) is a humanitarian worker investigating a recent massacre, when he’s called off to another massacre site. While the crew investigate the site they get the feeling something sinister’s going on - heads smashed open and brains devoured - and then they’re suddenly attacked by some very weird creatures, looking like “shaved albino chimpanzees”, with armour under their skins, fangs and claws, and a viciously carnivorous belligerence towards humans. Nick only just escapes, and in doing so rescues an African baby - the first of a number of naïvely and doggedly righteous acts that only get him into worse and worse trouble.
And immediately Nick is in trouble, because the authorities want to cover up the existence of these “white devils”, insisting that they were white-painted child-soldiers, and Nick will have none of it. The plot gathers momentum as he searches for the truth, and we learn that his own secrets may be part of what motivates him…

While Nick can be counted as the main protagonist, he’s by no means the only viewpoint character. McAuley excels at multi-threaded plots where the different point-of-view characters can put radically different slants on what we’re shown. Matthew Faber is one of the many mad scientists in the novel; he’s become unhinged due to some past experiments on mind, and lives on an island with a beloved tribe of genetically engineered proto-humans. Meanwhile his sassy daughter Elspeth is on a dig somewhere else in Africa, making an apparently revolutionary anthropological discovery… Christian eco-terrorist and mercenary-assassin Cody Corbin is out to kill anyone who tampers with God’s DNA; and there are yet more mad scientists and other colourful characters.
McAuley - who is a biologist himself - has always painted a world where morality is far more than black & white, and here the number of factions and opinions is overflowing. Mixed in with this is some interesting commentary on the filters between our perceptions and the truth, whether it’s guessing games in anthropological investigation, attempted reverse-engineering of human evolution (and the evolution of mind), or indeed spin-doctoring by corporate and poltiical interests.

If this all sounds over-the-top, it’s remarkably believable in the book. It’s set only 30 years in the future, carefully drawn out from the current world. McAuley fans will note some continuity with previous McAuley works, from the seminal and brilliant Fairyland (set in a future Europe of refugee camps and rogue biotech, and presumably taking place a little after this book) to The Secret of Life, to Red Mars and many short stories, both older and newer. And it’s reassuring and fun to see the recurring McAuley character Darlajane B making a typically important-yet-fleeting appearance.

White Devils is a very fine work indeed, and hopefully will sneak past the radars of those who don’t think they like hard sf.

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