One thing this job has taught me is that when people are caught in the maddening swirl of time, they do what they need to do and invent their reasoning afterward.”
It is simultaneously a good detective story, spy novel, political thriller, personal drama, and science fiction piece. Yes, it falls within each of these genres fittingly. The sci-fi element takes a unique position; it is central to the plot yet never fleshed out. As the story goes on, the time travel and Men-In-Black-like gadgets stay palatable even though not deeply explained. This is because the lack of technological explanation eventually, intentionally, becomes pivotal to the story and its main character, Zed, a time traveling agent from the future.
Zed is sent back to our present-day to maintain history as he knows it against time traveling criminals who wish to change it for their benefit. Zed’s being from the future brings distanced outsider appraisals of our world that are worth remembering. One thing this job has taught me is that when people are caught in the maddening swirl of time, they do what they need to do and invent their reasoning afterward.”
Everybody learns from the past but Zed’s occupation makes him a hard-boiled historian, aware by experience of humanity’s pitfalls from times before his own utopian era.
It made me wonder if that was how life worked in this beat, if everyone spied on everyone else, if parked cars were full of cops and feds and dicks, if on every Metro ride you were subject to the gazes of paid informants.”
No man is an island, obviously, and Zed’s utopian ideals are sometimes chipped at by the old era he visits. His atheism, for example, is challenged by the heightened emotion and spirituality of his 2000s love interest/assignment.
‘Seriously, though. Almost makes you wonder if someone was guiding us, strange as that sounds.’
The woman in that passage is Tasha, a bereaved 2000s Washingtonian. Her soldier-brother’s death is a punctuation of how changed post-9/11 America is. Though that factor makes her pain acute, she’s rightly aware that the world will never be the same now for anyone.
She wanted to blame the military for this new life of having her bag and purse checked everywhere she went–not just airports but Wizards games, the Smithsonian museums, her own office building–even though she knew the military was hardly to blame. This was America, and for once she didn’t want to be treated like some potential assassin, would appreciate a smile from a stranger, would like people to remember how it felt to live in a city made up of neighbors rather than spies and informers.”
I personally remember the time shortly after 9/11 as one when most people came together and cared for one another. The quote above accurately reflects what happened after the unity though; ashes of disillusionment settled over our resolve as war raged abroad and at home. From those ashes conspiracy theorists grew ever more prominent, trying to fill the voids of our uncertainty. Tasha sees this too:
Then a couple of ‘visiting economics professors’ (likely unemployed) gave a long, meandering lecture about ‘world capitalism’s master plan for the subjugated people of the Middle East.’ Tasha tried not to fall asleep as she sat there listening to old white men discuss how the free marketeers had deliberately seeded chaos in Baghdad, just like they did in New Orleans after Katrina and in South Asia after the tsunami; even supposedly random events like meteorological disasters were ascribed to a nefarious cabal’s master plan. If the making of legislation and sausage were two things you just did not want to witness, Tasha thought, the same seemed to be true of world peace. This was some seriously tedious shit.”
Gail, a present-day intelligence officer professes some unfortunate truths in a smart aleck way:
Jones’s wife was Persian–that’s how Iranian Americans describe themselves when they don’t want to freak people out.”
Also noted in his story line is the obsolescence many skilled workers increasingly battle in the face of technology, even skilled workers such as spies:
‘…. From what I understand, he was part cryptologist, part telecom wizard for whatever the hell it is they do there.’ People in Leo and Gail’s line of work tended to despise the techno-geeks at NSA, who were slowly co-opting the CIA’s money and influence with their monstrously powerful ability to overhear and oversee pretty much anything on earth.”
The Revisionists was published in 2011, Author Thomas Mullen keen to advancements that were growing mass surveillance and unmanned war.
Leo, the other operative in the above quote, has to be the book’s most optimistic or, erm, patriotic character. His view of things in the United States is relative to the worst parts of the rest of the world. His view is worth at least consideration, especially when we American’s get riled by the stereotypical first-world problems: What utopia were people like T.J. dreaming of when they rallied against the minor problems of capitalism and democracy? Had they taken a look at the world around them? Didn’t they realize how much better this was than any other country, any other system, any other way of life? Had they failed to notice that every time some mad dreamer took the reins of a country by revolution and promised his people a paradise on earth, he delivered the opposite? T.J. and his pals reminded Leo of the academics he’d grown so tired of; they’d been too busy lining up for Abuses of the American Empire 101 to bother learning about Stalin’s gulags. They’d been too busy mocking Oliver North and Reagan to read about the Sandinista death camps. They’d been too taken with the romance of the Black Panthers and the Weatherman’s heroic post office bombings to take heed of the warnings in Pol Pot’s exterminations or Mao’s purges. They had so much fun pointing out all that was wrong with the closest thing to perfection that any of them would ever see in their angst-ridden lives.”
Zed, our time-hopping secret agent, has a less passionate read on America’s condition in the 2000s. It’s true that world he has visited profoundly moves him at times, but he often also observes it with detachment. It isn’t that Zed is cynical; he’s just a future cop who’s been around the past block:
The corpses will constitute quite a mystery, but this is Washington, and the assassination of two nameless men will likely be assumed to be the tip of some iceberg best given a wide berth.”
Zed’s work largely detaches him from sentiment and vigor. But as we read, we slowly learn some important things that shape Zed’s personal life and consequently shape his mission. Zed relearns them with us, as much as he tries not to let them peak to the forefront of his mind.
Grief is funny that way. Time stretches and stretches and you think you’ve eased into it, but then it snaps back at you and you feel you haven’t moved an inch from the moment you first heard the awful news.” |