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White Devils
by Paul McAuley
(Simon & Schuster, £12.99, 521 pages, hardback, published 2 February
2004; ISBN 0-7432-3885-0.)
Paul McAuley's near-future thriller White Devils builds  upon
the foundations of the past while looking boldly forward.
Its African setting and its journey towards the secret headquarters
of a military commander gone "native" overtly reference Heart of
Darkness. Its obsessed and perhaps insane geneticists hark back
to Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein and Wells's Dr. Moreau. McAuley's biopunks,
genetic hackers who work both within and outside the global corporate
marketplace and who proudly display their (often illegal) cutting-edge
body modifications, are obvious descendants of the cyberpunks.
While investigating a mysterious massacre in the Congo, Nicholas Hyde,
a man of many secrets, sees a group of colleagues savagely murdered
by "white devils" -- small, ferocious, nearly unkillable primates. Obligate,
a cult-like conservationist corporation that owns the country, goes
to desperate lengths to cover up the existence of these genetic monsters,
while Hyde wants to speak for the dead and dig up the truth behind the
white devils' creation.
McAuley's novel occurs in a future recovering warily from various plagues
and environmental catastrophes. Genetic engineering is the science du
jour, and people are largely defined by their relation to it -- anarchist
biopunk, corporate owner of copyrighted DNA, researcher, "green" terrorist.
Unfortunately, although White Devils is indeed fascinating and
intriguing, McAuley, somewhat clumsily and manipulatively, telegraphs
several of the novel's supposed surprises while hiding revelations from
readers even after the protagonists uncover them.
This book -- a well-informed and engaged confluence of biology, genetics,
racial politics, globalization economics, and environmental issues --
comes close to being a radical work, but it still espouses the anthropocentric
and mechanistic worldview at the root of the problems it decries. Thus,
the novel's ethical core is confused and muddled, much to its detriment.
White Devils is nevertheless a thought-provoking page-turner,
which, sadly, doesn't quite fulfill its considerable ambitions.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 20 March 2004.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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