Seven Down by David Whitton

Published by Dundurn Press/Rare Machines on November 30, 2021

In 2010, several employees of a hotel in Toronto are recruited by an organization they only know as “the company” and trained for a mission. In 2022, they finally receive the instructions to which they have been trained to respond. One of them creates a diversion in the hotel lobby, although not quite the diversion that was intended. Another retrieves a container of chutney from kitchen storage in the basement and takes it to an upper floor. A bellhop swaps clothes with a man in the elevator who takes the chutney from the woman who retrieved it. Events pile upon events. Each person narrates his or her role to interviewers/interrogators after Operation Fear and Trembling has gone awry. The story is told through their interview transcripts.

Through most of Seven Down, the reader must guess at the significance of the characters’ actions. What is the mysterious organization that recruited the hotel members? What is Operation Fear and Trembling? How and why did it fail? What were the consequences of that failure? What will happen to the participants after their interviews are finished? Some of those questions go unanswered, although the reader is given sufficient information to imagine a variety of answers. A summative document at the end supplies some missing pieces. It also makes an observation that the reader will surely appreciate: Operation Fear and Trembling was a needlessly complex means of attaining an end that could have been achieved much more easily. No wonder it went tits up.

As the reader waits for the missing pieces to be supplied, the meandering interviews reveal the personalities of the recruited employees. Leonard Downey, the bellhop who swapped clothes in the elevator, was an anarchist before he took his hotel job. At the time of the interview, he’s being held captive on an island. As one might expect from an anarchist (or maybe from anyone who is being held captive), he's far from cooperative. But he’s also quite funny as he demands cigarettes and dodges uncomfortable questions and tries to justify his decision to set a police car on fire during a G7 protest and complains that, given his experience with mayhem, the company didn’t give him a more active role than trading clothes with someone on an elevator.

Kathy from Catering, the middle-aged woman who delivered the chutney, had a sexual encounter with another character while they were both carrying out their roles, although neither knew that the other was involved in the operation. Their different perspectives on who initiated the encounter and how it went are amusing. One suspects it was initiated by the woman since she repeatedly propositions her interviewer while complaining about her lackluster sex life.

Rhonda handles security in the hotel. She epitomizes the paranoid members of society who think vaccinations will turn them into zombies. She’s convinced that heavy metals in vaccines have turned her into a walking 5G receiver. An officious and self-involved hotel manager and a systems operator who places the company ahead of her family contribute their own quirks to the dysfunctional cast of characters.

The elaborate plot of Seven Down is really just an excuse to bring together a group of troubled people who gravitate toward the company in the hope that it will supply meaning or excitement or a purpose that their lives are missing. Apart from allowing the reader to occupy the minds of its all-too-human characters, Seven Down offers some observations about humankind that are either perceptive or obvious, depending on how much attention you’re paying to the world. A character notes, for instance, that the pandemic “swept its ultraviolet wand over the earth, exposing for all to see the douchebags and sociopaths who had overrun and debased it.” A riff on “disaster capitalists” who hope to exploit the next human tragedy is also worth considering. “Plagues are the future so let’s use them to make money” is a problematic philosophy.

As a dark comedy, Seven Down delivers more chuckles than belly laughs. Still, the characters have attitude and the plot is too unpredictable to permit a reader to lose interest.

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Three Years with the Rat by Jay Hosking

First published in Canada in 2016; published by St. Martin's Press/Thomas Dunne Books on January 24, 2017

Scruffy has been grieving the loss of John and Grace, causing him to enter a depressive self-destructive state, much to the consternation of everyone who knows him, particularly Nicole, his former girlfriend. Scruffy probably has a real name, but if Jay Hosking revealed it, I missed it. Scruffy calls Nicole Trouble and Nicole calls him Danger, but most of his friends seem to call him Scruffy if they use his name at all. Maybe the absence of an identity is meant to symbolize the illusory nature of reality that is (I think) the story’s point.

John was Scruffy’s good friend and Grace is Scruffy’s sister. Grace has been missing since 2006, although there have been some sporadic Grace sightings since then. John, after trying to harm himself, spent some time in a psychiatric hospital. Immediately after his discharge in 2007, he starts building a box. In 2008, John is also gone, and it falls to Grace’s brother to remove the box from their apartment. He also adopts Buddy, John’s lab rat.

There are mirrors on the walls inside the box and … well … other things. Scruffy reassembles the box and enters it. The experience is unpleasant. Eventually Scruffy’s life becomes unpleasant, or at least odd, as he enters a reality in which memory of his existence fades away.

The story bounces around in time, which seems appropriate since time plays a key role in the story. Grace and John were researching the difference between objective and subjective time. Once Scruffy starts messing around with their experiment in an attempt to rescue John and Grace, he finds himself in a reality that differs from the one he remembers.

Even if the shifting time frames sort of make sense in the framework of the story, the technique is usually used to bring different timelines together in a way that slowly reveals whatever the author has been concealing from the reader. Sometimes the technique works well, but in this story it contributes little more than confusion. The hidden fact (what happened to John and Grace?) could have been revealed with just as much impact, and probably more suspense, if the story had been told in a linear fashion.

Eventually — and it takes too long to happen — the novel morphs into a horror story melded with a science fiction story. It is an imperfect meld because the horror isn’t frightening and the science fiction builds rather unscientifically on concepts that been around for decades.

That doesn’t mean Three Years With the Rat doesn’t have entertainment value, but the slow development doesn’t lead to the big payoff that justifies investing so much time to get there. I found myself asking “But why?” at several places in the climactic scene, and never quite puzzled out the answer. Fortunately, Hosking writes smoothly and his agreeable prose style offsets some of the novel’s weaknesses. Still, I can only give Three Years with the Rat a qualified recommendation because too much of it makes too little sense.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Published in Canada in 2015; published by Nan A. Talese on September 29, 2015

The Heart Goes Last is both playful and subversive. It is satirical and allegorical. The story it tells can’t be taken seriously, but its targeting of people who behave like sheep, sacrificing freedom for comfort, of men who find new ways to oppress women, and of corporations that place profits ahead of … well, everything … is well taken. Margaret Atwood doesn’t beat the reader over the head with lectures about morality, but the background themes are never far from the reader’s thoughts.

The economy has tanked. Stan and Charmaine are living in a car. The rich are living offshore on tax-free floating platforms. Stan’s life is tied down by “tiny threads of petty cares and small concerns.” Joining his brother Conner in the criminal underclass may be Stan’s only hope. Charmaine, who works for tips in a bar, is tempted to turn tricks until she sees an even more tempting ad for the Positron Project.

Against Conner’s advice, Stan and Charmaine join the corporate/social experiment called Consilience/Positron. The experiment involves voluntary imprisonment in exchange for full employment. In alternating months, residents of the prison (Positron) swap places with residents of the village (Consilience), but even in the village they have no freedom, in that they are cut off from the outside world. They see only the news, television shows, and movies that are chosen for them. They work at the jobs the project gives them. They own what the project allows them to own. The project demands meek obedience to its rules; disruption has harsh consequences.

Against this background, the story begins to explore the relationship between Stan and Charmaine, their inability to connect with each other and their consequent misunderstanding about who the other person is and what the other person wants. As the plot moves forward, the characters must decide whether they are loyal to each other, to themselves, or to Consilience. Another plot thread compares complex relationships between humans to simpler interactions between humans and robots (or, more precisely, sexbots). Of course, some human relationships seem robotic, which is one of the points that Atwood’s novel makes.

The Heart Goes Last combines a serious story about the breakdown of society with satirical commentaries on the cozy relationship between government and big business, the not-so-cozy relationship that is often defined by marriage, and the exploitation of the powerless by the powerful (particularly, but not exclusively, the exploitation of women by men). It also makes the point that there will always be people who are willing to give up freedom, independence, and any ability they might possess to think for themselves in exchange for comfort and security. After all, life is just easier when other people make decisions for you. Of course, for every bit of freedom you choose to relinquish, the people in control will want you to give up just a bit more. Utopia comes at a price.

The Heart Goes Last stitches together a number of novellas that Atwood previously published in what science fiction writers of the 1940s and 1950s called a “fix-up” novel. It reads well, but the fixed-up nature of the work is apparent in some of the sharp turns the novel takes. Atwood takes the story a bit over the top with all the varieties of evil she concocts, but that’s the nature of satire, and when greed is being satirized, going over the top is forgivable. Some of the humor might be a little too easy (although making fun of Elvis impersonators never gets old) and the story provokes more smiles than outright laughter. Still, this is a fun book.

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The Water Rat of Wanchai by Ian Hamilton

First published in Canada in 2011; published by Picador on May 6, 2014

A forensic accountant is an unlikely thriller hero, but Ava Lee is an unlikely forensic accountant. Ava is a Chinese-Canadian who is as adept with martial arts as she is with a calculator. She's more of a debt collector/skip-tracer than she is an accountant. This is, however, a big league version of debt collection.

Ava's current task is the collection of $5 million stolen from a company that financed a seafood supplier. Her travels take her to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Trinidad, Guyana, and the British Virgin Islands. None of the locales gave me the sense of seeing anything that a tourist wouldn't see, but I did get the impression that Ian Hamilton has actually been to those places. A resident's view of the countries is unnecessary as Ava has a tourist's perspective, including an obsessive concern with the amenities available at hotels, as well as their star ratings. Needless to say, Guyana disappoints her. That crime-ridden location nevertheless gives her a chance to show off her formidable fighting skills. At the same time, the story's violence is kept to a necessary minimum. This is more of a cerebral thriller than an action novel, although the action moves at a brisk pace.

Ava is my kind of thriller hero. She's intelligent, resourceful, cunning, a woman of action who thinks before she acts. She gets things done and doesn't monkey around on her way to her goal. Much the same can be said of Hamilton, who writes with certitude, reaching his goal with a minimum of fuss. This is a tightly constructed story that doesn't waste a word. That is a skill that has become increasingly rare among modern thriller writers. The story avoids overreaching and is easy to believe, another rarity in modern thrillers.

In addition to highlighting the corruption that is endemic in less developed countries, Hamilton adds color to the story with Ava's domineering mother and her inscrutable business partner, Mr. Chow. But it is Ava who makes the story work, and she makes it work well. Originally published in Canada in 2011, this is the first novel in the Ava Lee series. It has encouraged me to read the rest of them.

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