he Pixel Eye is Paul Levinson's third novel to feature NYPD forensic detective Phil D'Amato, following The Consciousness Plague and The Silk Code. Called in to investigate the disappearance of squirrels from Central Park, D'Amato rapidly discovers there's more to this case than meets the eye. The drugs used to tranquilize the squirrels might be from a laboratory in Cold Spring which is conducting research on hamsters' response to music—but is that all they're investigating? Another lab in Cambridge is doing similar research on squirrels—but are they really able to tap into squirrels' brains to record what they see? And if a squirrel can be used as a mobile camera, why not as a mobile bomb?
Things become more serious after the Cambridge lab burns down seconds after D'Amato leaves it. A federal agent named Frank Catania seems to have more pieces of the jigsaw, and leads D'Amato to a bunker deep beneath Wilmington, where he is briefed by a hologram of himself. But if realistic holograms can be projected without any apparent machinery, other characters in the novel might also be illusory.
These events take place under the shadow of Sept. 11. In this near-future United States, the threat of terrorist attacks is ever-present. D'Amato frequently reflects on how fragile life in New York is and how vulnerable, say, Grand Central Station would be to attack. Moreover, in this fog of war, it's not always clear who is fighting for what. The government agencies behind the research are shadowy bodies whose motives seem ambiguous. In such a world, D'Amato finds it more difficult than ever to distinguish friends from foes. As one character says to him, despairingly, late in the novel: "What happened to our world, Dr. D'Amato?"
There may be worse things than terrorism
The Pixel Eye is a thoroughly enjoyable book, extremely readable, and brave in confronting the consequences of Sept. 11. However convinced readers are by the new technologies that Levinson describes, he's thought through their implications thoroughly. Many different perspectives are given on the possibilities of using, say, squirrels as surveillance tools. What would that mean for civil liberties or for animal rights, as well as for the prevention of terrorism?
Phil D'Amato is a likable narrator, and the story is told at a good pace. It's also nicely deadpan at times—in how many other books does the narrator say, "As lunch ended, I realized that procuring a microphonic hamster would not be simple"? However, some of the characters sound pretty similar to each other, and a lot of the action consists of D'Amato running from pillar to post having conversations with the next person on his list. Comparing this book with, for instance, William Gibson's Virtual Light gives a better idea of the possibilities of the near-future thriller. Gibson's book has an urgency to it, a snap to the dialogue and a sense of the chaos of events unfolding, that aren't always present in Levinson's.
In a way, the problem with The Pixel Eye is that it gets too transfixed by its ideas. The plot, driven by tensions (imagined or real) between the government agencies fighting terrorism, doesn't measure up to the scale of the questions it raises. The ending resolves some issues and leaves others hanging. It's also an oddly American-centered book. Reading The Pixel Eye, you'd scarcely know that there was a world outside the United States, or that the two might affect each other. Whatever else you think about the threat of terrorism, you can't talk about it by considering one nation in isolation.
So Levinson has written a successful page-turner, but one that also feels like a missed opportunity. Perhaps Phil D'Amato's next investigation will dig deeper.
