THE SENTINEL - Book review

 

The Sentinel (2020) is the first Jack Reacher novel co-written by Lee Child and his brother Andrew.

Some readers have voiced their disappointment; and I can understand that to a certain degree. Yet I cannot see the join. How much is Lee, how much is Andrew? I couldn’t even guess. There are the usual scenes one comes to expect in a Reacher novel; some many pages long, where it’s talk-talk to reason everything out and tell us what’s what, interspersed infrequently with explosive action. The one-word sentences are still there. The repetitions. Even people who are named are referred to by their role, job or other aspect rather than their name, which can become tedious. Maybe there’s not so much wit or dry humour. But in the final analysis none of that matters: the style and the story inevitably suck the reader in yet again.

The book begins in Nashville where Reacher comes to the aid of a band of musicians who are denied their earnings by a nasty club owner. We know how that’s going to play out… This seems like pure Reacher even if the incident has no relevance to the main story.

Hitching a lift, Reacher ends up in a town where he prevents a civilian being kidnapped – in daylight. The town is suffering computer outage and the guy he rescues, Rusty Rutherford, is being blamed for it and has been sacked from his IT job. Of course there’s more to it than that. Is it just a simple case of computer blackmail? You get your systems back if you pay the ransom. Or is it something more? Some of the plot seems overly contrived and even confusing, with ludicrous misdirection pertaining to the Second World War.

The Macguffin this time is the The Sentinel, a computer application, the country’s last line of defence against computer terrorism – illuminatingly explained on p265 with regard to ‘stolen elections’ etc; which is nice and topical. And yet it isn’t mentioned until p195, over half-way through the book. Like so many Reacher titles, this one is not memorable; after a short while it will blend in with all the others.

Rusty’s helper is an ex-FBI agent (that’s useful!) called Sands. Behind the scenes is a guy called Speranski who is calling the shots, pulling the strings, and trying to track down Rutherford. There’s mention of the Center, whatever that is. Possibly I missed something, but the Speranski guy seems to vanish from the story at some point; I might have blinked. Maybe the Childs ran out of space or time so left it to the FBI to sweep up the bad guys, one of whom is presumably Speranski. Perhaps less description of furniture and buildings that have no relevance might have allowed for more space to bring alive the Speranski anomaly. I blame the editor. Unless Speranski is going to figure in the next book, of course...

Reacher’s charisma must be slipping, too. There was no sex though an invitation was implied…

Not one of ‘his’ best efforts, alas. Not a ‘keeper’. In my view.

Faceless rule-makers

Yesterday’s post about Facebook’s abysmal security algorithm prompts thoughts about the power of faceless rule-makers and how they deploy that power.  Lest we forget, computer applications are designed by humans, who are as prone as the next person to commit errors.

Whether it’s a computer, an in-car system or a game on a tablet, it cannot have been tested in every conceivable scenario. I recall some years back seeing the standard message on computers, along these lines – ‘You have committed an illegal action.’ Which definitely alarmed law-abiding new users, who worried about what they’d done… This is typical of some programmers – too lazy to program and test for all eventualities, they let the conditional options drop through a number of possible messages and then throw in a catch-all – ‘illegal alert!’ – to capture any other unforeseen route a user might go down.

It’s the English language being misused: illegal in my dictionary says it’s something that’s contrary to or for bidden by law. The last time I looked, computer programmers didn’t make law – they make rules. The same goes for android and robots used with regard to tablets and apps. Android is an automaton resembling a human being; robot was invented by Karel Capek in his story ‘R.U.R – Rossum’s Universal Robots’ and derives from the Polish, Ukrainian robota, forced labour, and Russian, robota, work. Early twentieth century definition now accepts that it can be a machine that carries out a variety of tasks automatically or with a minimum of external impulse (such as factory robots); that’s still a big leap from software applications.

Are the individuals who label these applications so devoid of imagination that they must steal an existing term for their jargon? Ask any sci-fi writer and he or she would probably come up with something appropriate. I realise that it’s academic my discussing this, when you consider that for the Windows operating system you have to click on ‘Start’ to log off (which was removed, sensibly, but the clamour from old users has demanded its return, a yearning for the familiar).

I digress. Consider two new ideas being bandied about of late – driverless cars and driverless lorry convoys!

We’re slowly blindly going down that path that was trodden decades before the Terminator movies were thought of, be assured.

If users become dependent on all these applications, then when they go wrong, as they do and will continue to do so, the resultant responses will be anger without management, frustration, and a tendency to rebel – whether as a hacker, a troll or in a more personal manner. It’s the stuff of science fiction. Harlan Ellison’s ‘ “Repent, Harlequin!” said the Ticktockman’ was about nonconformity being a felony, as well as being a moral tale. Sci-fi authors extrapolate current trends to see where it might lead. Jim England’s story ‘The Globe’ (published in Auguries #6, 1987 is about, among other things, litter louts being zapped by a surveillance stun-gun. And the late Bob Jenkins published a short story ‘No Fire Without Smoke’ (published in Adlib, 1985, reprinted Portsmouth Post, 2007) that casts cigarette smokers as public enemies, liable to be incarcerated or even shot…

'The Globe', 1987

 

The point – faceless rule-makers, if allowed, can take us down a road of unintended and even unperceived consequences.

Back to normal tomorrow…