REVIEW - Halting State by Charles Stross (2007)

Despite not being due out until October (or January if you’re in the UK), there must not be many people in the SF scene incapable of telling you the basic premise behind Charlie Stross’ new stand-alone novel Halting State.  Set in a post-independence Scotland ten years into our future, the book revolves around the robbery of a bank in a World of Warcraft-style MMORPG.  Written exclusively in the second person, the book follows a Scottish detective, a game designer and a forensic accountant as they get sucked further and further into what turns out to be the opening shots in a struggle for geopolitical supremacy played out not on the battlefield but on the internet.  A near-future techno-thriller written with the ‘net literate in mind, Halting State contains more than enough good ideas to reinforce Stross’ reputation as one of the most flexible and intellectually powerful authors operating in modern SF.  However, like many of Stross’ novels, Halting State struggles to keep its narrative both coherent and engaging as a multitude of twists and reveals serve only to highlight Stross’ difficulties with plot as well as giving the book a strangely disjointed and piecemeal feel that make this novel slightly less than the sum of its parts.

The most obvious technical difference between this book and most other novels you will read this year is the use of the second person narrative (“you”). Seen as technically demanding and normally the preserve of the self-help book and the technical manual, the second person is usually used to create a sense of intimacy between the narrator and the reader as the implication is that the narrator is somehow confiding in the reader or filling them in on something about themselves.  However, while books such as Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City might have used the second person to great artistic and technical effect, I suspect Stross’ deployment of the technique has less to do with conveying a particular relationship between narrator and reader and more to do with medium emulation.  Indeed, one medium that systematically uses the second person viewpoint is the table-top role-playing game in which the person running the game will explain to the other players what is happening to their characters by using the second person such as “You wake up finding yourself chained to a wall in a dungeon”. 

While undeniably a clever quirk and a sign of Stross’ ambition as a writer, the wheeze really goes no further than making the book sound a bit like an RPG.  At no point does the narrator shift from being anything other than omniscient and neutral and the book is completely free from the kind of post-modern boundary play that featured so wonderfully in Mary Gentle’s  fantasy novel Ash.  In fact, after a couple of chapters the novelty wears off and the unusual POV melts into the background.  Nor is this the only technical trick that melts into the background as Halting State also includes a trickling stream of Scottish slang.  “Heid”, "Bampots", “Hen” and “D’ye ken?” feature prominently enough to prompt the reader to give the characters a fleeting Scottish accent but not so prominently as to alienate any potential American readers, these interjections feel more like affected gimmickry than real stylistic innovation.  Indeed, in both his use of the second person and phonetics, Stross’ writing contrasts unfavourably with that of Scottish contemporary Iain Banks.

Much like Halting State, Banks’ A Song of Stone features a second person narrative.  However, where Stross’ narrator is completely neutral, Banks’ narrator Abel is compromised and his version of facts is sought out only grudgingly by the reader’s assumed persona Morgan.  Before A Song of Stone, Banks had also experimented with phonetics in his 1994 book Feersum Endjinn.  Including a large chunk written in the first person by a dyslexic character, the book manages to feel a lot like Irvine Welsh’s 1993 book Trainspotting, which heavily featured dialogue written in a Scottish phonetic patois far more atmospheric than Stross’ occasional lapses into slang.  However, perhaps I am being uncharitable.  Some might argue that by pointing out the inadequacies of Stross’ stylistic flourishes I am missing the point and being unfair to the book as, after all, the book is not intended as a work of stylistic experimentation or technical prowess.  It is an SF novel full of ideas and an espionage-inspired plot.  I have a certain degree of sympathy for this view but to embrace this view and therefore discount the book’s stylistic shortcomings one must also discount the book’s most hyped characteristic; the online bank robbery itself.

Much like Stross’ other works, Halting State is a spy story.  It is, at first glance, a near-future techno-thriller but once you break the book down to its basic components you’ll see that it’s ultimately all about people running around trying to outwit each other on behalf of some larger political entity.  This is true of Stross’ SF, it is true of his fantasy, it is true of his horror and it is true of this book.  Halting State is ultimately all about a small-scale confrontation between the Chinese Intelligence services and the European and British Intelligence Secret services.  The MMORPG bank robbery is certainly eye-catching but it really is nothing more than a gimmick that, given some of Stross’ comments about the natural constituency of SF, feels a lot like an attempt at pandering to a particular audience.  As with Stross’ stylistic flourishes, this would not be problematic if it the ideas were treated with a little more care and attention.  Instead the MMORPG stuff feels a lot like an idea that’s picked up, played with a bit and then put to one side in order for Stross to move on to what really interests him.  This would be okay if the meat of the book were nicely put together but unfortunately Halting State suffers for its complete lack of a proper conclusion.

This has frequently been a problem in Stross’ work.  Last Year’s Hugo-nominated Glasshouse features a former spy realising that he’s trapped in an artificial environment created by a bunch of dangerous tyrants.  Stross takes the book to the edge of a climax and then whisks the whole “defeating the tyrants” thing off-screen.  The same is true of Stross’ Merchant Princes series where Stross wrote his protagonist into a position where she was trapped and forced to marry but rather than having her confront her family and outwit them, he relies upon the deus ex machina of a Nepal-style massacre to restart the series with a whole new political context.  Halting State deals with two teams of Chinese hackers running around Scotland’s communications infrastructure while spies try to work out what’s going on.  But rather than engineer a confrontation and a climax, Stross allows the problem posed by the hackers to somehow drift away as he shifts attention away from the plot that completely dominates the book and towards the relationship between the characters and what the repercussions of the whole affair are for them.  Meanwhile the Chinese hackers remain faceless and nameless and the characters never enter into any real contact with them.  The same is true of the man who organised the raid of the bank and the people who employ the forensic accountant and the game designer.  Sure, the plot lines are dealt with in a “and the children were saved by... oh... let’s say Mo” fashion and there are no obvious holes but Stross refuses to give his readers the satisfaction of having his characters solve the problem.  This results in a plot where the characters are almost entirely passive and are pulled through one scene after another without ever seizing the initiative or really doing anything.  The result is a story that completely fails to emotionally engage the reader.  Instead we are pulled along much like the characters, distractedly looking over ideas as they trundle past us.

So is this a bad novel?

Well, the plot is creaky and sub-standard when compared to Stross’ other works and even when weighed against the plots of other ideas-based writers such as Stephen Baxter.  Indeed, the plot of Halting State is comparable to the shambolic and character-neutering affairs that have come to dominate Tom Holt’s more recent writings as rather than using a simple but sturdy plot structure to hang his ideas on (like say the cyclical episodic process of enlisting, going-away, returning and re-enlisting used in Haldeman’s The Forever War thereby freeing him up to talk about changes in human society), Stross goes for a full-on technothriller only for his habitual refusal to provide climaxes to rob the entire thing of any emotional élan.    This is not helped by the fact that the characterisation is broadly weak with characters serving more as sources of commentary than as real dramatic constructs.  The forensic accountant is particularly weak in this respect.  In fact, some of the lesser characters lapse into outright parody as a business man is portrayed as an insanely intense and aggressive sociopath while his pet nerdlings say things like “traceroute is my bitch” with irony desperately thin on the ground.  However, despite these numerous failings, I find it genuinely difficult to hate this book.

Stross is one of the few contemporary SF writers who genuinely seeks to engage with our futures, but rather than write about the future as an engineer or a physicist might by focussing on space technology, Stross looks at the future through the twin lenses of contemporary computing and real world politics.  Halting State is at its best when Stross is simply allowed to hold forth on how the high street may look the same but is in fact suffused with technology unthinkable 25 years ago or how the criminal justice system has shifted from broad crimes such as “disturbing the peace” to insanely narrow ones such as “walking a loudly barking dog in a hospital zone”.  Similarly, Stross’ talk about the 21st Century being a battle between Europe, China and India is refreshingly different from visions of the future incapable of looking past US hegemony.  Stross is undeniably one of SF’s best ideas men.  He is incredibly knowledgeable about a wide range of topics and even if those ideas might not hold up to close scrutiny they are fascinating while they last and are liberally coated with Stross’ truly world class skill at technobabble, by which I mean a stream of jargon that may well be impenetrable to the reader but nonetheless sounds exactly like something knowledgeable people might say.

If I am harsh about Stross’ work it is more out of frustration than genuine scorn.  Stross’ ideas are deserving of a wider audience but I do wish that he would take more time and care with the other aspects of his work.  It really is not acceptable for a writer of Stross’ calibre to be unable to move past writing spy stories disguised as other genres.  Nor is it acceptable for him to write plots that are never properly resolved.  As it is, Halting State feels more like the output of a writer stuck in a rut or cynically content to churn out content than that of a writer who is genuinely committed to growing as an artist.  Halting State is Stross’ weakest work to date and that is a depressing thought when you consider how wide an audience the book could reach if it were marketed at the Tom Clancy and John Le Carre crowd.

Comments

[James Aach]

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