re:mote voices

Title: Electric
Author: Chad Taylor
Publisher:Vintage

We didn’t want to come down. We did another line, in the men’s room. I lit her cigarettes and talked about modal jazz, why the band wasn’t very good. She talked about karma and neutrinos, the particles passing through matter, every second: through walls, metal, food, skin.
-Electric – Chad Taylor

Sam Usher is getting through each day with as many drugs as possible – having survived a car crash that wrote off his car and his long term relationship. Working as a data recovery expert means he is sitting on a gold mine, or at least has enough cash coming in to fund his habit, especially when Auckland is hit by a series of power cuts. This is how he meets Jules and Candy, fascinated by the mathematical modelling systems he recovers on their computer. Getting to know them he finds that they share his chemical interests, and he falls for Candy at the same time. The threesome moving from party to party, while the city becomes a kind of alien environment, shifting from day to day with the repeated blackouts. Against this background things get weird, Jules is found beaten in the streets, with a letter for Sam which consists of the three words “anyway freedom goodbye” and a page filled with numbers, and in the meantime Candy has vanished.

Electric is essentially a drug novel, with elements of a thriller coming in as Sam tries to understand what the sheet of numbers means, why Jules was beaten up, and where Candy has gone. In amongst this he has to deal with the police, drug dealers, prostitutes, and a city gripped by the hottest summer in years and mad power cuts. However the tension really isn’t in it, and with the drugs as fuel the book at times loses the plot – verging into a level of incoherence with the turn of a page, as things start to come together plot wise they fall apart in terms of dialogue, so that certain events seem to flip us out there entirely.

At just over 200 pages Electric is a decent enough read, reasonably enjoyable. Though it isn’t entirely what it claims on the cover blurb – describing “candy and jules, two drifting mathematicians, each after a holy grail”, while the reality is that they are more like jet-set travellers, cruising the diplomatic circuit, smashed out their heads on drugs, with the occasional reference to pet projects. Further “sam’s pursuit of the truth will lead him into an underworld of chaos and turbulence, where numbers rule” is a considerable exaggeration. Visions of nomadic mathematicians, driven by hardcore math, revealing universal truths were one of the attractions for me to Electric. Instead there are a couple of references to wave theory, a couple of tattoos of mathematical formula. The chaos comes from the altered states of mind provided by large quantities of drugs and the unpredictable power cuts, which are an entirely different proposal.


So, aye, Electric, its not bad, but not really what it could have been.