f the many secrets buried in Paul McAuley's mostly brilliant new SF thriller, I am going to reveal two. The first of these should have lain unspoken beneath the surface of the text, but as McAuley talks about it lots (p. 347 and elsewhere), I'm going to blow the gaff here. The second secret should not, I think, have ever been a secret, because its import bears on events from the get-go—if, that is, we are to make more than superficial sense of the whambam slamdunk cineplex action that fills the book. Unlike the typical technophobic horror novel dressed in SF thriller clothes, White Devils settles much more happily in the mind when we can sense the pulse of real thought inside the noise. So I'm going to blow that gaff as well.
White Devils takes place entirely in Africa. The first secret is that McAuley has structured his story around Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). As it is pretty likely that an Africa Question tale written by a non-African will make use of the most resonant portal ever designed to convey non-Africans into the continent, this is dangerously obvious territory to be coy about; either the author should fess up very clearly, or he should keep the bone buried deep in the soil of telling. McAuley does neither. Few readers are going to miss the significance of the "offhand" mention of Kurtz that gives the game away on p. 347; nor will they be blind to the implications of the fact that it is the Congo up which the entire surviving cast ascends into darkness as the novel reaches its climax, into a wasteland Dead Zone that ingests them there; nor will readers miss the echoes of Martin Sheen, from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), whom the protagonist of White Devils quite resembles, though not as closely as McAuley's obese Kurtz figure, whose name is Doctor Lovegrave, resembles Marlon Brando; nor, finally, will many readers fail to register the fact that Lovegrave repeats the word "horror" more than once on a single page (see p. 438).
The problem here is that the obviousness of these allusions is a form of teasing that exculpates the reader from paying serious attention to anything so glaring, allows us (and the very sharp, smooth-tongued McAuley himself) to skid over the underlying message conveyed by any use of Heart of Darkness as narrative model. The Conrad jokes in White Devils absolve us from Conrad: From the horror that vibrates in our hearts when we sense an abyss between what is said and what cannot be understood by saying stuff, which is what Heart of Darkness is all about: for it is structured as a witness to abyss; and it tells us moreover, specifically, that the West (which is what we do, which is what we utter) cannot compute the world (which is Africa, which is the Darkness our stories do not lighten, which is the West's greatest current nightmare: the abyss of consequence). In the end, because McAuley is clearly dead serious when he talks about the consequences of the West upon the world, I think he should perhaps have let Heart of Darkness lie unspoken within his text, like no joke at all, like a bomb.
The implications of the second secret, which is that the deadly White Devils of the title are not gengineered from chimpanzee stock but from human genes directly linked to Lovegrave and other characters central to the novel, echo back and forth throughout White Devils. (I should make it clear that this secret, though not formally divulged until p. 380, has been amply and teasingly telegraphed by McAuley from early on; indeed, it was clear from almost the first page that the book was not going to make much sense if it turned out that the White Devils were not our brothers, our darkness, our twins, our shadows, our making, our consequence.) But to get at this, we must say something about the story itself.
A future that dare not speak its time
Here the reviewer can get into deep trouble. Though McAuley's dazzling traversal of his material is genuinely compulsive, no short synopsis can give any real sense of the sly smooth slippery rightness of the way White Devils is actually told. The cast list seems, for instance, impossibly congested, with dozens of named characters, most of them accompanied by caption bios in the docuporn style favored by most near-future technothriller writers. Only slowly do we understand that McAuley has no intention of allowing this plethora of folk to become a terminal distraction. Far more ruthlessly than in most technothrillers in which an asteroid does not impact our home planet, he kills off these biogloss creations, one by one, though sometimes in bunches—coldly, competently, deadpan, and sometimes offstage so that the action can continue unimpeded—until by the final pages only a few members of the original cast (they are, fortunately, the characters we care most about) manage to survive what has become a formal Dance of Death. It's a very European take on the complacencies of technothriller porn, Hello out of Bergman.
This cast, vast though diminishing, goes through its Dance in an Africa that has lost 70 percent of its population to a form of hemorrhagic influenza called the Black Flu, whose effects have been worldwide. We are in the deep near future (McAuley obeys the technothriller rule that dates must not be given), somewhere between 2020 and 2040 at a guess (he dates a Nazi artifact as being more than a century old, but also speaks of Boeing 767s as being "old," which is what they are now). Up the Congo lurk even worse horrors, central among them a manmade disease which turns biomass into a grotesque Dead Zone inimical to life, composed of cellulose, and giving off a terrible beauty:
Light's alchemy turns the plain of cellulose-9 and scrub into a magical kingdom, a djinn haunted desert where rainbows chase each other across crystalline dunes and spectral halos burn over the bejewelled shards of shattered tree stumps.
History has proceeded as we might expect from the vantage of 2004, pity the planet. Gengineering has birthed miracles and monsters, with Africa housing an unstable unfair share of the latter. The African country now called Congo has become a country called Green Congo; it is run by an ecologically conscious transnat called Obligate, from the biological use of that word to describe organisms that can only exist in one particular environment, like humans on Earth. ... McAuley's take on Obligate is relievingly complex. Though its ecological politics are PC enough, its political hegemony over the Congo replicates, in softer hues, previous white colonialisms. Its programmatic clearing of "engrams" from the minds of those within its grasp, to make them better human beings, may remind some readers of the program of a certain organization. Most importantly, Obligate's abhorrence of gengineering is treated by McAuley with the complex ambivalence of the true SF writer of the 21st century: because biotechnology is a Pandora's box, out of which joy and sorrow, intertwined and viral, blow into the world, and SF writers like McAuley understand this ambivalence; technohorror writers (like Michael Crichton) fail to.
The secrets of life are just the beginning
Some of the vast cast of White Devils seem to have read some good SF; others seem to have read nothing. The spectrum of responses to the central, plot-engendering event of the novel, the sudden deadly appearance of feral gengineered monkeylike monsters from across the Congo, is similarly complex; and a traversal of these responses, within the mind of the novel's main protagonist, strings that spectrum into storyable form.
Nicholas Hyde, that main protagonist, is himself a genetic monster, in hiding. His true name is not of course Hyde (in another of McAuley's quite numerous jokes, we learn that he was brought up in a stately home in England whose garden was designed by the historical Gertrude Jekyll); we never learn his true name, and it doesn't matter. Nor is his problem—he is the clone of his dead older brother, whose life he has no capacity, or wish, to replicate—touched on more than glancingly in the novel. What is important is that, like the White Devils, and like Matthew Faber, who helped create them along with the Gentle People who are their shadows, and like every human being upon the planet, Hyde bears the abyss of the other within him.
He is an employee of Caritas Green Congo, gathering forensic evidence of atrocities due to an ongoing civil war. He is called to a site, where he and his colleagues are ambushed by the White Devils, whose teeth are fangs, who are impossibly fast, and who know how to fire guns. He attempts to publicize their existence, but the Obligate-dominated government frustrates this. Its reasons for doing so are impossibly complex to describe, and anyway most of the coverup perps kick the bucket soon enough. In a second mainline of story, Elspeth Faber (the scientist's daughter) fails in her attempt to protect the Gentle People, recreated examples of Australopithecus afarensis whom Matthew Faber claims are gengineered from chimpanzee stock, but who are in fact our own close siblings. Matthew has also been deeply involved in the theory of engrams, and thinks he has isolated the one engram—cd2—that causes extra-species aggression. The Gentle People have no cd2 engrams. Matthew himself, unfortunately, has had his own psyche buggered up, probably by his old colleague Doctor Lovegrave, and a cd2-run inner Hyde intermittently surfaces, "something terrible and dark at the dawn of consciousness," which turns him into a kind of White Devil.
The Dance continues, deaths trim the cast down to the nub, shadows of the White Devils within us haunt the survivors. Lots and lots of things happen—the action scenes are uniformly stunning—as the upper reaches of the Congo are neared, separately, by Nicholas Hyde and Elspeth Faber, who do finally meet. In the heart of the Dead Zone they find the dying Lovegrave and his colleague Doctor Todd, both of them imprisoned by yet another insane warlord. But the deaths continue, clearing the air, so that we can see the point of it all, which is to get at the philosophy which has gengineered obscenity (and benefice) out of the ravished jungle. Lovegrave's deep sin is that he has played Faust, he has opened Pandora's box with no thought of consequence. Like the Kurtz within him, like the Heart of Darkness within the text, he is a model of the obscenity of thinking you know the territory, when all you have is a map.
But the territory within each human being, as White Devils ultimately and healingly deposes, contains both White Devils and Gentle People, who are immiscible in the making of us. Whole human beings, it deposes, are not conquests but chivalries. Those human beings who grow up and who survive are knights. Late in the novel, when Nicholas Hyde faces a White Devil and does not shoot him, we realize that White Devils, for all its harum-scarum dazzle, was never really a technothriller at all. It was always something far more interesting. It was always an SF novel about the secret of life.
