Whole Wide World by Paul McAuley, Voyager, £16.99, ISBN 0002259036
A FOX strolls into the gaze of CCTV cameras. As each spots it, lights snap
on. It tries to outrun the glare. “At last it could run no more and stood still,
scrawny flanks heaving, eyes blankly reflecting the glare of the overlapping
circles of light that briefly twirled around it.”
Paul McAuley’s urban fox stamps itself on the awareness of the policeman hero
of Whole Wide World as he struggles to make sense of the watched and
watchers. Both inhabit a London of the near future, broiling and humid in the
globally warmed world, where all the walls have eyes.
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As I write, London swelters and I think of Carlo Giuliani, killed by Italian
police during demonstrations against a meeting of the G8 industrialised states.
As McAuley wrote, protests at a G8 meeting have escalated into an “info war”.
Microwave bombs and hackers have wiped out the hard drives of the City of
London’s money market. The economy has crashed and burned. That provided the
excuse for the state and its agents to get a tighter grip on people’s lives.
Information is power: ubiquitous smart cameras can track a person across
miles and days. Voyeurs in the police force can claim that they watch for the
greatest good of the greatest number. Others, sexual and sadistic, turn the
spying eyes to murderous purpose. A woman’s killer plays his victim’s death as a
sick movie and disguises his motive and identity in a tangle of remailings and
pornography.
McAuley has Len Deighton’s gift for smuggling useful knowledge into a
gripping tale. His story reminds me that the flip side of the saying
“information wants to be free” is that everywhere information costs. The price
may be paid in freedom—or in blood.
