n Mockymen, the latest novel by Ian Watson, Chrissy Clarke and her boyfriend and business partner, Steve Bryant, are commissioned to create four custom-made jigsaw puzzles by an elderly Norwegian, Knut Alver. This odd assignment takes the couple from their English village to Oslo's Vigeland Park and its monumental stone sculptures, where they encounter a mysterious drunk, Carl Olsson, who hints at a dark power haunting the park. A year later, Chrissy and Steve, tormented by recurring nightmares, are soon caught up in the efforts of an aging Nazi collaborator, who is near death, to draw on an occult power centered in Vigeland Park in order to achieve his reincarnation in a new body.
Little more than a decade later, in 2010, an alien vessel arrives on Earth. With their advances in nanotechnology, the aliens offer humankind a way out of the food shortages, economic disasters and social problems that beset Earth, but there's a price for their largesse. Earth must allow the construction of transit stations so that the aliens, who have destroyed their ship to prevent it from falling into human hands, can travel instantaneously, inside the bodies of their human "couriers," to other planets that they control. Earth must also allow the distribution of an alien drug called Bliss, which gives users a year of ecstasy before they inevitably turn into "dummies," comatose bodies that the alien minds can enter, inhabit and use as their puppets while they are on Earth.
Anna Sharman, an analyst for British intelligence and one of those in charge of monitoring alien activity on Earth, is surprised to discover a "dummy," a former Bliss addict who, instead of remaining in the usual coma, awakens with the identity and memories of a long-dead Nazi collaborator. As she tries to find out more about this young man, Anna is drawn into a complicated conspiracy involving two couriers, a strange stone called a quantum crystal and a rogue alien who reveals his species' true purpose in coming to Earth, one which threatens to doom all human civilization.
Another wildly inventive tale from Watson
Ian Watson is one of science fiction's most intelligent and inventive writers, whose underlying theme is the possibility of transcending what is thought of as reality. He is also a versatile and prolific writer, who has pursued his characteristic theme in short fiction and novels of horror, science fantasy and the "harder" varieties of science fiction without repeating himself. His ingenuity is amply displayed in Mockymen, perhaps almost to excess; Watson begins with an atmospheric tale of occultism and Nazis, moves on to a more familiar science-fictional story about aliens who dominate Earth, offers intriguing glimpses into an alien culture and wraps everything up with an action-packed sequence in which the fate of all humanity is at stake. Along the way, he throws in a cast of well-drawn recognizable and exotic characters, realistic glimpses of small-town and urban British life, fascinating and bizarre historical details about World War II, a convincing extrapolation of what Britain (and the world) might be like under alien rule, a suspenseful plot and plenty of speculation about mind-body dualism and the nature of consciousness.
Given the number of different directions his story takes, Watson might easily have lost control of his material. It's somewhat disconcerting to move abruptly from the first part of Mockymen, a dark, carefully wrought horror story of a young British couple, Nazis and black magic that is narrated by Chrissy Clarke, to a depiction of the alien-dominated Earth as told by Anna Sharman. Along the way, Watson suddenly breaks from Anna's first-person narration to give us a third-person look at certain incidents in the lives of two kinky and masochistic couriers, Barnabas and Zandra, before returning to Anna's point of view, as if too impatient to find a more elegant way of conveying one of the most important parts of his story. There's a sense that the writer has tried to weld several different shorter pieces into a novel, rather than respecting the kind of architecture a novel usually requires.
In the hands of another, less intelligent writer, this kind of flashy story could (and often does) become incoherent, but Watson has enough intellectual power to ground his tale. What gives his novel its underlying unity, and enables him to combine such disparate elements as alien conquerors and Nazi black magic, are his serious speculations about dualism and the nature of the self; Watson doesn't build his novels on the more traditional building blocks of character and plot so much as rigorously imagine them into existence. The disorientation his narrative strategy produces might even be seen as part of his method, his twists and turns a way for readers to experience and confront the serious questions he raises about the nature of our consensus reality. Fans of one of science fiction's most inventive and playful intellects and those who prefer new ideas with their science fiction should find Mockymen rewarding.
