James Smythe, No Harm Can Come To A Good Man (2014)

Since I admire Smythe as a novelist very much, and since this novel does many of the things that made his earlier books so admirable and memorable—what I mean is, it shares their clarity, inexorableness and force—I’ve been trying, since finishing it, to work out why it didn’t really work for me. Could the problem be … me? Perish that thought.

Laurence Walker is a shoe-in for the Democratic Party Candidature and therefore a shoe-in to be the next President of the United States of America. But early in his campaign for the party nomination tragedy strikes: his young son drowns in the lake at their family cabin. After a period of mourning Laurence picks up election momentum again, back on the campaign trail. Only there’s a glitch. Amit, his campaign manager, has elected to use ‘ClearVista’, a company that provides predictions of future outcomes based on a brilliant algorithm that synthesises all the relevant online data. The impression from the early portions of the book are that ClearVista has achieved a kind of social saturation, with people using its phone-app to help make everyday decisions (later in the novel the company comes across as more marginal than this; I may have missed something). So Amit makes Laurence complete the 1000-question ClearVista survey, expecting the return to endorse his perfect POTUS-worthiness. In fact it returns 00% chance of Laurence winning the nomination; and also supplies a video as a sort of visual animation encapsulation of its assessment. This shows Laurence in a very poor light. Furious, Amit tries to reach people at the company and is brushed off (the first point in the novel to make my improbability compass needle wobble). He requests a re-run and it is performed; but the numbers come back the same, but now the video shows Laurence threatening his own family with a gun. These results are leaked to the media, and Laurence’s campaign is toast.

SPOILERS from hereon in, by the way.

From here, and after a perhaps too diffuse 200 opening pages the novel picks up pace, and Smythe pitilessly follows through on the inevitable breakdown and tragic end of poor old Laurence. The denouement is very tense; the ending nicely judged and I liked the way Smythe crafts a hamartia-free tragedy that nonetheless reads as an intimate character study. The arbitrariness of the downfall makes for real pathos.

So why, then, did I finish with a nagging sense of something awry? In a nutshell: I didn’t -- quite -- buy it. This partly has to do with the whole suspension of disbelief thing. Towards the end we discover that [SPOILER! Weren't you paying attention, above?] no humans actually work for ClearVista; the algorithm has become, in some flattened way, self-aware. But what might have been a Demon Seed-style moment of horrified realisation instead made me think of the ending of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, in part because Smythe deliberately down-plays the idea that the algorithm is properly sentient. He doesn’t want a grinning villain in his tale, which is all to the good; except that I just didn’t believe a world that relied on ClearVista to the extent portrayed wouldn’t know that the company’s entire Human Resources checklist is one guy in a blue jacket who used to be a security guard and now kind of mopes about the otherwise empty offices. The video, leaked to the press, instantly annihilates Laurence’s credibility as a candidate, even though it is a 3D animation of something that has never happened. Nobody outside Laurence’s immediate circle seem struck by the fact that it’s a pure fabrication—again, in part because Smythe wants the tragic inevitability of the thing portrayed to send vibrations along the story thread from the beginning.

There were other grinchings. Laurence’s early electioneering seemed a touch too West Wing final series to me: and for a plausible candidate for the most powerful job in the world he’s a strangely solitary individual, with only Amit (apparently) on his campaign team. And the death of the child reminded me of the storyline attached to the Matt Damon character in Syriana. Ordinary people in this novel act en masse: they all support Laurence at the beginning; they all immediately change their opinion of him when the video is released; and at the end they actually come storming his house with pitchforks and flaming brands (well: with guns—but with fire too) like an instamob from The Simpsons. All these TV/film references! But that’s part of the way the novel felt to me, too: a novelisation of an imaginary movie. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It's just that I didn’t think that Laurence, a previously highly intelligent and clear-sighted man, would have persevered so assiduously with terrorising his family with a gun at the end. To be clear: of course it’s true that men have terrorised their families with guns many times under the malign self-justification that they are somehow ‘protecting’ them. But the extra element in this scenario is that the thing that sent Laurence mad was precisely a video of him terrorising his family with a gun. As the scenario unfolded with its horrible inevitability, it seemed to me that Laurence would have clocked that he was acting in a way to make the video come true, and stopped. Showing the world that the video was a lie was his whole rationale. Anyhew. Not to nitty-pick.

In the end I wasn’t sure what the novel was saying. If it's aiming at a symbolic articulation of the grief of bereavement at losing a child, it would be meagre indeed—for such grief is not a matter of society ganging-up on you, the snake-like morals of the mass media or of hiding in cabins armed to the teeth. As a psychological portrait of mental breakdown, it is hamstring both by the exceptional nature of its protagonist (war hero! POTUS-plausible!) and by the slightly airless nature of its time-loop conceit—the prophesy that ensures its own coming-true. There’s much here that is powerful and well written, but somehow it did not win me over.