re:mote voices

Title: Someone To Watch Over Me
Author: Tricia Sullivan
Publisher: Millennium

Adrien arrives in Zagreb having been beaten worse than he has ever been beaten before. Mistaking Sabina for a taxi driver he enlists the young Croatian musician to help him recover from his injuries. Adrien is a Trans, someone with a "plant" in their head, which uses HIT (human interface technology) to allow a remote Watcher to interface and experience what the Trans does.

Adrien knows his Watcher only as C, and C is becoming increasingly unpredictable. If C had its way Adrien would have killed a man in Moscow, and it is C's fault that the tech that he was in Moscow to buy attracted the attention of Max. The HIT comes from the Deep, an organisation or group mind, no one is entirely sure. For the most part HIT is illegal, except for in Russia, where Max works as a kind of PR/enforcer for the Deep.

With the events in Moscow and his meeting with Sabina, Adrien decides he has had enough. Its time to get out, if he can get enough distance from Max and C to achieve that. But the technology that Adrien was supposed to buy in Moscow is the next big thing. Something so important that Max must get a handle on it, and that C needs, and if Adrien won't do the job, then C will use Sabina.

Tricia Sullivan's current novel is Double Vision, published in over-sized paperback in 2005. Someone To Watch Over Me is an earlier work, from 1997, and the third novel by Sullivan that I have read. This novel is perhaps the strangest of the three, probably because it feels in someway like it is set in 1997 and yet is so removed from what we know. On the one hand there is a discussion of King Kong, the version with Jessica Lange, and how it could be remade - which immediately dates it - along with the Croatian angle, and the war that happened there in the 1990's. On the other there is the whole HIT and Wire technologies, Wires being a kind of experiential/virtual experience that in its legal form is given away, but includes subliminal adverts.

Its the strangeness, the undercurrent of Sabina's music woven through the text, the shifts in narrative points of view, and the play with fonts and first/third person that make Someone To Watch Over Me such a rush. Unfortunately I suspect that only Sullivan's 2 most recent novels, Maul and Double Vision, are readily available, making something like probably harder to find. Though if you do stumble across a copy of Tricia Sullivan's Someone To Watch Over Me then it is worth a read.