Vice and VIRTUE

It is hard to know whether I would have been more or less frustrated to read Greg Jackson’s first novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, had I already read his debut collection, Prodigals (2016), rather than coming to it second, as was the case. On page seven of the collection’s tremendous opening story, “Wagner in the Desert”, I marked the following line, which made me laugh: “the men looked on equably, having made their peace with death, aureate in the power of knowing excellent tax lawyers”. Underneath I scrawled: “Where was this?” At the time of the collection’s publication Jackson told the Guardian: “I love novels … but it’s such a slog to write one”. It shows.

On the same publicity circuit Jackson discussed his admiration for Joseph Conrad, singling out Lord Jim (1900) as one of the books that “respected me enough to address me honestly, with no concern for the comforting mythologies of our self-regard”. Conrad’s shadow looms over The Dimensions of a Cave, pitched to the reader as “a modern retelling of Heart of Darkness by way of the metaverse”.

Standing in for Charles Marlow is the investigative reporter Quentin Jones, who recounts his story to three friends from journalism school. At the beginning he is down and out. His relationship of twelve years is on the rocks and he has been sidelined at work. His sleuthing has led him to SIMITAR (“Soft Interrogation Managed in Totally Artificial Reality”), a project designed to stage a Truman Show-esque ersatz world (actors, false websites, etc) in which a prisoner, believing themselves free, might show evidence of further wrongdoing. At the eleventh hour his exposé is reduced to “a blip, a glorified squib” after complaints by the new president’s administration, with whom the paper’s publishers need to curry favour.

Unable to let the matter drop, Quentin picks up the tracks once more, and finds that the project – whose first trial went disastrously wrong – has been brought back from the dead. VIRTUE (“Very Immersive Real-Time User Environments”) aims to provide a digital space for interrogation, one free from “the organic chaos of human agency”. All roads, it emerges, lead back to Quentin’s protégé, Bruce (the book’s Kurtz), who went to report on the foreign war that provides the book’s backdrop – Afghanistan, we assume – and vanished. So begins a vast, involute quest through the wilds of the military industrial complex, via a quagmire of false leads, duplicities and thumbs pressed on the scales of justice.

Not unlike Conrad’s sailor, Quentin is wont to “start a tale at some far corner and begin shading in, so that details and people emerged faster than the gist and the whole image did not coalesce until the very last accent line brought out the critical connection”. His friend tells us that this narrative style “betrayed the epistemology of a reporter, who knows that truth always inheres partly in the manner it is arrived at”. It thus seems a particular shame that Quentin’s mode of delivery so frequently hampers what might otherwise have been a clever conceit.

It is not just the speed at which the information emerges that’s the problem, but its sheer volume. Around page thirty I started jotting down names as an aide-mémoire; by the end I had a headcount of seventy-four. The desired effect, one assumes, is to replicate for the reader the experience of being a journalist. You never know who is going to be important later on, what links might be made. Yet there is a wearying paucity of variance between speakers; the snappy wit and lightness of tone that made Prodigals so enjoyable is sadly absent. Instead we are faced with showboating soliloquies:

Propaganda, mass surveillance, algorithmic metadata analysis, torture and interrogation: these are responses to a world in which violence is a property of information, understood in information’s terms. The deaths occasioned by terrorism are a mere byproduct of its goal, which is informational violence. It means to attack the minds of those who survive, not the bodies of those who perish.

There are still fragments that impress, not least when the author attends to different qualities of natural light: “the sun broke into the mist with charged filaments and a grainy wash as rich as acid on a metal sheet”. Yet these glimmers are scant consolation over 480 pages in which the thematic threads – the clashing matrices of power and information; what the concept of harm might mean in digital spaces; journalism and the temptation of conspiratorial thinking – fail to cohere into anything truly novel. We can only hope for another collection in which Greg Jackson can return to a form less arduous for him, and for his readers.

George Berridge is an editor at the TLS

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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