Resumo de Surveillance - Jonathan Raban

In his last novel, "Waxwings," British-born Seattle author Jonathan Raban took on his adopted city during its dot.com boom and bust, producing a "Bonfire of the Vanities" tale of greed and hubris that was like a splash of cold rainwater in our smug Northwest faces. It was an affectionate satire that, for some readers, struck too close to home.
In his new "Surveillance," Raban ? best known for his nonfiction portrayals of the United States ? paints a terror-haunted Seattle of the very-near future, a city of road checkpoints, roaming Humvees and actors hired to enact practice disaster scenarios staged so frequently that they have become numbing in their repetition.
This is a Seattle on constant orange alert, and the reader quickly comes to expect an Orwellian satire on the state of fear promulgated by the Bush administration, a prophetic yarn of habitual paranoia.
There''s some of that, as characters give voice to the national-security debate that has bubbled since Sept. 11. "Americans take democracy for granted: they don''t stop to think how delicate and fragile it really is," one character warns. " only needs to create the right set of circumstances, and we''ll finish the job for him."

Author appearance
Jonathan Raban will read from "Surveillance" this month at these locations:
? 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at Seattle''s Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600; www.elliottbaybook.com).
? 7 p.m. Feb. 15 at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (206-366-3333; www.thirdplacebooks.com)
? 7 p.m. Feb. 26 at the University Book Store''s Seattle location (206-634-3400; www.ubookstore.com)
Raban is slyer than that, however. He envisions a Seattle not just where the government spies on its citizens but where citizens unconsciously spy on each other ? not because of government edict but because none of us are entirely honest about ourselves, none knowable, none trusting. In this Seattle of tomorrow, life is a constant state not just of fear but uncertainty.
It is the ordinariness of that uncertainty, not the ticking clock of a terrorist plot, which makes this novel haunting. In the 21st century, how certain are we about anything: job, pension, politics, or even climate?
Lucy Bengstrom is a freelance writer assigned to do a profile of a reclusive Whidbey Island author named August Vanags, an unremarkable retired academic who has suddenly hit it big with a vividly rendered book of his childhood in World War II Europe.
Is Lucy honest about her motives when she talks her way into Vanags'' home and befriends his wife, Minna? Can Vanags be trusted in the attention he bestows on Alida, Lucy''s pubescent daughter? Why is Lucy''s Chinese-American landlord, Charles Lee, so anxious to change her locks and install a security camera over her door? Can Lucy''s gay actor friend, Tad Zachary, learn not only the truth about Lee but about his own doctor, and their mutual HIV fates?
Surveillance piles on surveillance. What is Alida''s middle-school computer-whiz friend up to? Did August Vanags really witness World War II in Middle Europe? Can even a simple auto accident be recorded clearly, or was a crucial detail missed?
Most of all, are the security police, the ferry marshals and the patrolling soldiers preparing for the likeliest threat?
Raban is not a mystery writer, and readers expecting the twists and turns of a conventional thriller will be disappointed. This is not a novel in which things are revealed, it is one in which doubt and confusion grow.
The book closes with an abruptness that may become his fictional trademark. "Waxwings" did not end, it stopped, and "Surveillance" shears off like a guillotine, the story line decapitated in mid-gasp. Uncertainty, uncertainty.
As usual, we get Raban''s perceptive description of the Puget Sound region and his fondness for capturing the lives of children ? presumably based on his own daughter ? as well as adults. It is interesting that as an immigrantvels of immigrants as both entrepreneurial and alienated.
The irony of this book is that uncertainty is what conservatives fear most, and yet the war of Islamic and Christian reactionaries has combined to create a Seattle in which not knowing, of never quite connecting, has become a way of life.

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