here secretly exists within our species a mutant strain known to themselves—and soon, to the whole world—as Deprivers. These people suffer from SDS, Sensory Deprivation Syndrome. Their very touch is potentially deadly. At the barest minimum, contact with a Depriver can inflict temporary sensory disabilities on the victim. At worst, permanent handicaps such as blindness or deafness. (The mechanism of the disease, we eventually learn, is a "bio-electrical virus" that permeates the skin and makes its way instantly to the brain.) Deprivers are thus doomed to a lifetime of lonely isolation.
Robert Luxley is a Depriver who confers temporary paralysis on his victims, and who has no knowledge that others of his kind exist. Luxley has evolved into a professional assassin, first paralyzing his victims, then killing them by conventional means. But when he is contacted by a young woman named Cassandra and informed of the reality of his nature, his mercenary life is derailed. Cassandra and her twin, Nicholas, are both Deprivers involved in an underground organization that intends to make the existence of Deprivers globally known in a positive way. But Nicholas has been kidnapped by a rival group led by the mysterious Deveraux, and Cassandra needs Luxley's aid to rescue him. Additionally, a secret government agency known as the Ministry is conducting an anti-Depriver campaign, and an ambitious politician named Tyrsdale has his sights set on riding anti-Depriver sentiment to greater power.
Once Nicholas escapes from Deveraux—having fallen in love with his daughter, Claudette—and rejoins his comrades, they journey to Amsterdam, where all the various factions will grapple to shape the public perception of their kind, a climax that closes part one of the novel.
Part two opens several years later and focuses on a new character, Alex Crowley. Not a Depriver himself, Crowley has married one, willingly accepting permanent deprivation from his wife's touch. But when Julia Crowley is assassinated at a rally, Crowley becomes a man bent on revenge. His quest takes him into all the niches of the tangled web of Depriver-human relations, and he finally becomes an agent of the Ministry. In this capacity, he does indeed find the man responsible for his wife's death, but without gaining much satisfaction. Afterward, we watch him handle other cases that illustrate the various roles of Deprivers in society, finally culminating in the discovery of a young Hispanic Depriver whose unique talents might mean a breakthrough in the tense stasis that grips the world.
Familiar spy-jinks and an anti-racist message
The Touch, an original anthology edited by Altman, appeared in 2000 and debuted the notion of SDS. The variety of contributors and viewpoints made for an intriguing package. Unfortunately, Altman's solo novel does not really elaborate or extend on the concept, and in fact somewhat lessens the whole notion, due to the novel's broad parallels with a more famous storyline: that of the X-Men.
In essence, every Depriver is simply the X-Man character known as Rogue, with her famous debilitating touch. Deveraux is Magneto, head of the evil mutants intent on establishing the inferiority of humanity. And the female psychologist Terry, a non-Depriver who acts as guardian to the teens Nicholas and Cassandra, is Professor Xavier. Governor Tyrsdale is the authoritarian character—to give him his movie name—known as William Stryker. The issues Altman focuses on—prejudice, secrecy, evolutionary development, fascism, inter-racial love affairs and so forth—have all been explicated in hundreds of comics and two films. It would be hard for anyone at this late date to grind fresh sparks off such material.
To fill the novel, Altman indulges in lots of noirish and James-Bond-style material. Alex Crowley, with his body oblivious to pain, is supposed to function as a kind of damaged urban knight like Philip Marlowe, say, but comes off merely as obsessive. There is endless hugger-mugger about "Delta Teams" and stakeouts and secret laboratories, but although the plot possesses some surface zip, it all really goes nowhere. At the end, salvation comes in the form of the freakish Depriver out of nowhere, who is introduced only 40 pages from the end. Altman's writing is not bad—rather reminiscent of Keith Laumer at his most automatic—but a bewildering number of shifts among different points of view do not contribute to the tale's cohesiveness. And there are logical gaps as well. For instance, Sparrow, a Native American Depriver who has lived most of his life on a reservation and has never left the United States, hops aboard a flight to Amsterdam spontaneously. Passport, anyone? Nicholas, sent on assignment by Deveraux, visits a hospital room that hosts both a male and a female patient side by side. What hospital mixes the sexes in the same room? Little things like that detract from the desired air of a sophisticated thriller.
As a potential franchise, Deprivers is not going to make Wolverine lose any sleep.
