2.16.2007
Beck, under The Sun
[Posted 10:32 AM by Emily Ghods]
The New Criterion’s fiction reviewer and once associate editor,
Here’s Lucy Bengstrom, the journalist heroine of Jonathan Raban’s “Surveillance”: “Next time she’d bring her cassette recorder, small enough to nestle unnoticed in her bag. … After her New Yorker piece on Bill Gates came out, Gates himself had dropped her an e-mail complimenting her on her ‘great memory.’ Little did he know.”
That reporters use dictaphones? …
As its title insists, “Surveillance” is deeply (or at least punctiliously) worried about the excesses of security in the post-September 11 age. The big concern isn’t that liberal democracy will be chiseled away by Islamist totalitarianism. It isn’t that a random city will reap the radiological whirlwind. It’s, Am I on candid camera?
Stefan ends his review with this indictment:
Suppose Mr. Raban had taken the trouble to exercise his imagination. He might have stepped outside our familiar world of credit card offers, courtesy calls, Google ads, webcams, peepholes, deadbolts, security wand, and Homeland Security. He might have assumed we despise it already. Then he could have envisioned a cowardly new world of his own — one capable of persuading us with subtlety and artistry that it isn’t safety we hate, but safety taken out of our hands.