(I was sent a review copy of this book by the publisher.)
What is social media doing to us? You don’t need to be a relentless pessimist to see Twitter and Instagram and Facebook as in many ways dangerous and divisive, encouraging us to be snide and snarky, to view many of our fellow human beings as simply a bundle of opinions and characteristics rather than as whole individuals with their own strengths and hopes and personal dramas. More seriously the instant feedback loops enabled by Twitter in particular both enable and encourage the terrifying pile-ons which are a large component of what has come to be known as “cancel culture”.
Behind this question lurk others; enormously important dilemmas about the future of public debate and reasonable discourse and whether anything approaching private life will even be possible in the coming surveillance society.
It is these issues that the thriller writer James Wilson has picked up in Coyote Fork. I’ve seen it described as techno-noir, and I think that term captures its general feel well. The noir element is there in the twisty story full of characters who may or may not be trustworthy, and in the figure of the lead character, a cynical and despondent middle-aged journalist - not an anti-hero exactly but certainly not a hero, an old-style ink-stained hack adrift in the new world of clickbait and engagement and #content. As for the “techno” component, the action of the plot centres on the founder of a vast and powerful social media platform, Global Village, which may or may not bear a strongish resemblance to a real-life corporation launched in 2004, with the ambition and the means to reshape human communication and interaction on a global scale.
The middle-aged journalist’s name is Robert Lovelace. As the novel opens he is at the California HQ of Global Village, attending a PR launch for their new software, a writing AI which looks like it will eventually make human writers obsolete. Lovelace storms out in disgust, and a strange encounter in the car park leads him into a dangerous and complex investigation of the strange past of Global Village’s founder, Evan Bone, a litigious and secretive man whose critics often face professional ruin and personal vituperation.
Wilson is clearly – and rightly – preoccupied with the consequences of the new world of social media and digital existence. In particular he is very hostile to the way in which social media has enabled a vicious and occasionally lethal culture of bullying self-righteousness, and the near-inescapability of surveillance in the age of the smartphone, the smart speaker and the GPS. We see this in Lovelace’s tentative relationship with a lonely academic, who has been persecuted by the progressive totalitarians among her students. Both she and Lovelace are harassed and intimidated by the shadowy antagonists of the story as well as by the self-righteous denizens of the world wide web.
Wilson’s concerns about the digital age show up late in the novel too. Lovelace, exhausted by his fruitless attempts to escape the internet Leviathan, holes up with some Native Americans, living off the grid in the California backcountry. Although this is a hard life, its wholesome simplicity is portrayed with a certain wistfulness. Granted, it is easy to romanticise the simpler life. As a busy husband and father, with a full-time job and a writing sideline and a never-ending to do list, I occasionally fancy myself as a monk, shorn of worldly possessions except psalter and Bible, with access to a splendid library, free to think and write and pray. Of course, I see only the enviable parts of the monastic vocation. I have an unrealistic conception of what it’s really like to live an entire life in that way.
All the same, it is crucial to visualise alternatives. Those of us who grow weary of the internet age may be underestimating its benefits and harking after a world to which we cannot return, but that does not mean that there is no value in imagining a world where more authentically human connections and a less hyperconnected existence are possible. It does not mean that we should stop criticising the dangers and corruptions enabled by widespread easy access to the worldwide web. And that is what Wilson is doing here. While the book hinges, in a sense, on the inevitability of humans misusing the opportunities of the internet, by laying out so clearly the ill-consequences of that misuse, he makes a quiet stand for a better world.
The novel’s dynamics and the broad outlines of the plot are not especially unusual for the thriller genre. Where Wilson does go off-piste is with the resolution. Refreshingly there are no fisticuffs or explosions, no implausible escapes from submerged cars or cellars slowly filling with nerve toxins, and none of those slightly over-detailed descriptions of firearms – you know the sort of thing, “he recognised the gun immediately, it was a WarCorp Deathsprayer PB600, one of only fifteen ever made, with a fine silver finish and a customised barrel mounted by a laser sight….”
Instead Coyote Fork climaxes with a conversation, which holds the key to the book’s overarching storyline. I will not spoil the ending by saying who is involved or what is revealed. Suffice it to say that the revelations were genuinely surprising and thought-provoking, while still emerging organically from what had gone before. We do gain a genuine insight into the character and motivations of the mysterious Evan Bone, the founder of Global Village, and while that insight does not render him especially heroic or likeable, it does make him comprehensible, not just an avatar of wickedness and corporate cruelty.
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