Ken MacLeod, Descent (2014)

Ryan is a regular lad growing up in a near-future Scotland struggling under yet another severe economic recession. He and his friend Calum have an encounter with a UFO. Ryan later 'remembers' an abduction experience, rather too fruitily supplied with all the clichés of that mode. Calum, though, has no such memories. After this vividly realised opening the novel in leisurely but absorbing style follows Ryan and his generation as they grow to adulthood. Nothing much comes of the UFO encounter, except that it primes Ryan to develop a series of complex, interlocking conspiracy theories: about advanced military tech disguising itself as alien saucers, about a new speciation event by which a secret homo neanderthalis bloodline is about to emerge and separate from homo sapiens; about the truth behind 'religious' epiphanies and of course (it being MacLeod) about politics, establishment agents pretending to be revolutionaries and vice versa, the complicity of the secret services and so on. This, it dawns on the reader, is the real theme of the book. Descent is, consciously or otherwise, a Jamesonian riff on the enduring appeal of 'the conspiracy theory' as such—Jameson, as I'm sure you know, thinks that our appetite for these sorts of things indexes our attempt to see our social, cultural and ideological milieu for what it is, a global interlocking system called 'Late Capitalism'. Meanwhile the economy gets sorted out via a quick nationalisation of the banking system and an acceptance of the trading dominance of China (or something); Ryan gets a job as a an online journalist. MacLeod has fun with some near-future tech: a world so saturated in surveillance its possible to assemble a real-time Google Earth rolling map just by sampling all the feeds. There are advances in fabric technology, a ramscoop jet that could cut access-to-space costs and the like. A dubiously sleekit fellow called Baxter stalks Ryan down the years in various guises: a priest, a man-in-black and so on. Baxter eventually becomes a political Big Cheese in the Scottish Parliament (I found this plot strand all rather hard to swallow, actually: not so much the conspiracy side to it, but the way he seems to have endless time for Ryan; the narrator phones him for a meeting and he immediately says 'I can give you an hour and a half, face-to-face' and so on). The book is dedicated to 'the memory of Iain M. Banks', and there's a decidedly Crow-Road-ish flavour to the storytelling. I enjoyed reading it very much.

What it lacks, despite all its excellencies, is menace. Even when the heavies turn up, late in the story, and rough-up our narrator the mood doesn't shift from its tenor of expansive, rather leisurely charm. Now this is not to be sniffed at, this latter quality: it is valuable, and very hard for a writer to do -- it is, for instance, quite beyond my technical capacity as a writer (I can do lots of things, but I don't seem to be able to do that). And it carries Descent a long way; the growing-up-in-Scotland milieu, the characters, the prose. It just doesn't quite carry through the thing that gives real conspiracy theories their tang, the curry-paste hotness that keep adherents coming back for more: the sense that it matters, the self-preening I'm taking a courageous risk by pursuing it. It's almost never true, the 'risk' thing. Actual conspiracy theorists risk only their sanity, and that sort of risk-taking is the opposite of courageous. But it's addictive nonetheless.