It’s the future; a realistic, depressing future. Things are chugging along, or perhaps winding down: eco-terrorism, the destruction of part of Moscow, the inevitable China crisis.
The protagonist, Thomas Bible, is a Washington psychologist who teaches at Columbia. He is approached by a team of FBI agents on the trail of a serial near0-surgical torturer who does gross things like re-wire the pleasure centres of porn stars so they masturbate with broken glass, burn away the ability to recognize faces or even other humans, and program the face of God into the mind of religious fundamentalists. The feds are positive that the culprit is Neil Cassidy, Bible’s oldest friend ( their so close that Cassidy called Bible ‘Goodbook’, and Bibles’s kids the ‘Little Gideons’). When presented with the evidence, and the knowledge that Cassidy has been working for the government to perform radical brain-circuitry alterations on terrorists, Bible has to admit that it’s true: his best friend is a serial killer and a visionary.
In college, Bible and Cassidy came up with The Argument: a smug doctrine that insists that all free will, emotion, consciousness, is essentially fake, illusory, and we are nothing but brains ‘buzzing against each other.’ Only a sliver of the brain is devoted to consciousness, and the machinery that makes it possible to invisible to us. The soul doesn’t exist; we barely exist, save as an efficient gloss to cover and justify (through confirmed biases and truths) our own competitive actions. We are only products of neural processes; we are little better than machines with some illusory programming on the top. Cassidy is on a mission to prove that he can make anyone do anything, feel anything, and want anything, by making his victims do, want, and feel impossible things. He seems to be intent on messing with Bible, his closest friend, in the most personal ways possible. Bible’s ex-wife and family come under threat, and the chase is on. This is, after all, a thriller.
As I read further into this book, I could feel myself recoiling – not because of the concepts (which some might find disturbing), but the writing.
Fucking bitch! Fuck-fuck-fucking cunt-whore-bitch!
In the dark Agent Atta’s look was hard and handsome in the way of solid women. Something in her eyes told Thomas that she enjoyed pointing her gun.
After he came across Sam’s breasts, the camera focused on the widow. She smeared pearl across her nipples then lifted her veil to lick her fingertips. Her face was at once hooker-hard and high-school soft. Beautiful, yet plain in the way of abused children—
“What kind of people might those be, Ger?” ”Smart-ass, know-it-all, arrogant pricks, with their terrorist sympathies, their hobosexual neighbours—” “Hobosexual?” ”Bum fuckers! Fags!”
As blank as a porn star between takes. So sweet. So sweet. At long last, you mean only what I want you to mean…
Your blood is not so hot as my semen.
There is nothing techically wrong in the writing; there are no boners of pronoun intent, nothing dangling, nothing broken. Yes this is egregious writing that induces discomfort and embarrassment. It’s sexual, but humourless and bald, and sort of reminds me of church ladies who try to get down and sing old Negro Spirituals and send the young people running for the church doors. There is an afterword for the book; it’s very dense and wordy. I’m often struck by the writing of educated people with large vocabularies: in theory they can write immense, logorrheic paragraphs, and yet when they have to write regular, simple prose they can’t help but come up with ‘There was something matronly and more than a little condescending about her demeanor’, or ‘For a pulse-pounding moment’, or ‘The fact that he was attracted to her said precious little: she was a fox, after all, and he was in the middle of the most emotionally tumultuous episode of his life.’ Good writing is to be able to transmit information simply, within the context of what is happening. Too much of the non-digressive parts of Neuropath seem forced and written to fill space.
Neuropath veers between halfway dense psycho-jargon about consciousness to hockey, forced dialogue and stereotyped characters: the Nietzschean philosopher-prince bad guy who’s smarter than everyone, the fuck-bunny blonde federal agent, the cute gay neighbour, the dumb religious blockhead cop, the humourless female agent who might be a lesbian, and the faithless, forever-wronging and shaming ex-wife.
Much has been made of Neuropath’s infamous sexism. The main female character is first used as a sounding board for the educated male protagonist’s expoundings, then fucked by him, then raped by him because he’s feeling stressed about the abduction of his son, although the novel ‘justifies’ Bible’s terrible treatment of her with a very ridiculous switcheroo. The cute gay neighbor, prone to fey one-liners, is used almost exclusively for babysitting to get the kids out of the plot until they’re needed, or to drive Thomas Bible to safety. Bible’s ex-wife, Norah, is laughably treacherous, slutty and shrewish. For some reason, nurses are given a real working over: ‘Stupid surly nurses,’ ‘… two nightshift nurse who seemed to be too caught up in gossiping to notice their presence’, ‘ … the neurological observation unit’s duty nurse—a once-pretty woman named Skye, if he remembered correctly.’
I take issue with your philosophical writings
I could tell you a few things about the inner mind…
The novel’s central premise is overheated. A lot of us are atheists. We’re not offended or frightened by knowing that if you screwed with our wiring, we’d act differently; we are fine with that. The same thing happens if you mess with our iPhones. We’re not alarmed to know that we are our brains and that is where our soul, if we have one, resides. We know we’re tribal, and that we confirm our own biases. It’s not that freaky.
And that accusation that much of our will and emotions are illusory – that is like saying that the flavour in food is an illusion that is secondary to our intake of protein and carbohydrates. I will still enjoy my French bread, even if it’s nothing but flour and water. I’ll still enjoy my Indian food, even if it’s little more than rice and beans with shredded plant seeds that activate my neural processes. I don’t care if you inform me they’re illusory; I will still enjoy them. I know I am my circuitry.
This is not to say that R. Scott Bakker is an awful person, or that he is piece-of-shit misogynist. He may very well be a perfectly nice person who happens to have written a book that I didn’t like. I will take a look at Prince of Nothing, because that series might be better, and because Bakker is a Canuck.