re:mote voices

Title:Mind’s Eye
Author: Paul McAuley
Publisher:simon & Schuster

When Alfie Flowers spots a piece of anti-war graffiti it brings back memories. Not the image itself, but rather the glyph that has been used to frame it. Alfie's grandfather had been part of a group who had discovered ancient symbols in pre-World War I Iraq, symbols which dated back thousands of years and with the right priming could penetrate straight into someone's brain. Alfie was exposed to these symbols and the drugs involved as a child, and has had epileptic type seizures ever since. Someone is using these images as art, someone from Iraq - Alfie suspects maybe they know enough about the symbols to help cure of him of his epilepsy, so sets about trying to find the person behind the images. However, Alfie isn't the only one - certain parts of the British Secret Service are interested, the symbols having been used during World War II, and also some people who want to use the symbols for their own sinister plans.

Mind's Eye is a thriller, set between London and Iraq, giving it a particularly contemporary feel. As a novel, Mind's Eye is something of a departure for author Paul McAuley, who has an extensive back catalogue of science fiction novels behind him. Though, it is not an entirely surprising change of pace - novels in recent years like World Wide Web and White Devils saw a move more towards a thriller/crime market. While those novels still had the trappings of future fiction, Mind's Eye is set in the last few years. Though it still has an edge of the strange, provided by the glyphs and the power they can have over the mind. This symbolism, the effects and history, being the particularly interesting aspects of Mind’s Eye.

This makes Mind's Eye more comparable to someone like Michael Marshall than previous McAuley work. Which is perhaps why the novel has a quote from Marshall on the cover, one SF writer turned crime writer doing another SF writer turning crime writer a favour. In some ways Mind's Eye is a dryer read than normal McAuley output, perhaps displaying more of an exploratory dabbling with the genre than an assured one. Regardless with Mind's Eye you can now find McAuley stocked under either literary or crime fiction depending on your local bookstore - hopefully this will expand his readership, and he'll build on what he learned with this novel on his next outing.