[Infowarrior] - Book Review: 'The Bell Ringers'

[Richard Forno]

Book World: Patrick Anderson reviews 'The Bell Ringers' by Henry Porter
By Patrick Anderson
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, February 1, 2010; C02

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/31/AR2010013101840_pf.html
THE BELL RINGERS

By Henry Porter

Atlantic Monthly. 402 pp. $24

George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four," was  
published in 1949 and presented a future, totalitarian England in  
which all-powerful Thought Police demanded total devotion to the  
nation's supreme leader, Big Brother. War was peace in this world,  
lies were truth, and the individual had no rights whatsoever. It's a  
powerful novel, a milestone, but Orwell, deeply influenced by the evil  
of Joseph Stalin, painted in broad strokes. In fact, 1984 came and  
went without his political fears being realized, at least in the  
English-speaking nations.

English journalist Henry Porter's "The Bell Ringers" (published in  
England last year as "The Dying Light") is one of many novels that  
have attempted to update "Nineteen Eighty-Four" -- and one of the more  
impressive. But while Orwell offered a worst-case scenario of what  
could happen 35 years in the future, Porter is writing about what, as  
he sees it, is already starting to happen. He declares in an afterword  
to his novel, "I have not made anything up: the law is all there,  
ready and  waiting . . . a fact that very few people in Britain  
perhaps appreciate." He has in mind not only the reality of England's  
ubiquitous surveillance cameras, but laws making possible "the  
suspension of  travel, seizing of property, forced evacuation, special  
courts and arbitrary detention and arrest." In Porter's fictional  
England, a cynical and ruthless -- but outwardly genial -- prime  
minister named John Temple is creating "an utterly new species of  
vindictive technological totalitarianism."

In Orwell's novel, the government used two-way "telescreens" that  
delivered Big Brother's messages and spied on the homes of viewers. In  
Porter's near future -- no year is given -- the technology is far more  
advanced. Not only are all calls and computers monitored, but the  
government has supercomputers that can pull together financial  
statements, medical records, credit-card spending, school grades,  
travel records and much else about every citizen. People can be judged  
disloyal simply by their spending, travel and associations. Porter's  
hero, David Eyam, warns that "this system has begun to presume to know  
the intentions of every mind in the country and is penalizing tens of  
thousands of people with increasing vindictiveness. You see, it allows  
no private realm. People can't exist inside themselves."

David Eyam (think "I Am") was once an adviser to the prime minister,  
but when he began to grasp the full extent of the government's  
surveillance program, he protested, was forced out and went  
underground. As the novel unfolds, he is leading a resistance movement  
and has obtained top-secret documents that he hopes will bring down  
Temple's corrupt government, which works closely with an equally  
corrupt American corporation.

Eyam gains support from his onetime lover and close friend, lawyer  
Kate Lockhart, who helps organize the rebellion as he hides from  
government agents. The early action takes place in a rural community  
where people are being harassed for refusing to carry the new national  
ID card. They are the "bell ringers" -- people who do ring bells in  
church but also are secretly fighting to protect civil liberties. The  
prime minister, Temple, wants to call a new election to consolidate  
his power, but first he wants to crush the opposition. When an  
outbreak of red algae occurs in several reservoirs -- probably from  
natural causes -- Temple declares it a terrorist plot, suspends the  
constitution, and fills London with soldiers and detention camps. When  
one patriot insists that people won't tolerate mass arrests, another,  
more of a pessimist, says, "That's the pity of it . . . they'll think  
the government is protecting them. They'll be reassured." That,  
finally, is the question: Do people care?

This is a sophisticated, engrossing and important political thriller.  
Porter wants us to see that the same technological tools that can be  
used to fight terrorism or to make government more efficient can also,  
in the wrong hands, be used to destroy freedom. Perhaps Porter's most  
important updating of Orwell is to show how corporate money might work  
with political corruption to create a dictatorship behind a democratic  
facade. The American corporation in this novel supports charities and  
think tanks, but it also makes the supercomputers that endanger civil  
liberties, pays huge bribes to the prime minister and his top aides,  
and provides hit men to dispose of critics. Far-fetched? Alarmist? Who  
can say? Recent events suggest that we in America have at least as  
much reason to fear corporate encroachment on democracy as do our  
cousins across the Atlantic.

Anderson reviews mysteries and thrillers regularly for The Post.