a new 1984, with hope for love in age of the machine

The cryptographer by tobias hill(faber, (pounds) 12)

IN George Orwell's futuristic 1984, Winston Smith believes love will defeat Big Brother. In Tobias Hill's dystopian vision of London in 20 years, there is also a belief that love will defeat the oppressive combined forces of money and the internet. Love signifies our humanity, in the face of forces which seek to dehumanise us. Love will conquer all.

Of course, in 1984 it doesn't. But in The Cryptographer, Hill's vision may not be quite as bleak. Perhaps if he too had written while suffering the effects of TB on a little Scottish island in a house with no electricity, his message would have been as apocalyptic as Orwell's was. But a trip to Coll - which both author and main protagonist take in the course of the novel - isn't quite the same.

The novel's opening is dark. Anna Moore is a tax inspector with the Inland Revenue, and she is meeting her mentor and former lover Lawrence for dinner. Lawrence no longer works for the Inland Revenue, after his excessive drinking got him thrown out, but he still knows Anna has been given a new case - to investigate the finances of John Law, the world's first quadrillionaire.

Law, a self-made man, is Scots-born. He has amassed his fortune by creating machine codes that are unbreakable, and from them, introducing 'electric money'. Thanks to Law's 'soft gold', as it is called, paper cash is no longer necessary. Paper seems to be a valued commodity in Hill's world - just as the little snow globe was an indication to Winston Smith of the humanity of a past age in 1984, here paper in all its forms (banknotes, books, parchment for heart- felt messages) seems to symbolise a more gentle time. Anna is the only one who seems to still read books - her sister, Martha, teases her about it and gives her a volume of TS Eliot poetry for Christmas.

It is this sensitivity that has made Anna good at her job: "To understand the rich you should know who they are rich for." She knows that even the most selfish people have 'someone' behind their reasons for making money. So when she meets Law, she's looking for the human figure in his background and soon focuses on his troubled, sickly son, Nathan, in whose name Law has stored some of his fortune. Anna doesn't have time for close relationships but as she investigates Law, she becomes fascinated by him.

Hill has written this novel in a very distancing third-person voice - Anna is usually introduced as "she" - which complements the machine-led world in which his tax inspector heroine lives. However, his style is careful to the point of preciousness sometimes, and there is the sense of a self-conscious search for the perfect sentence that occasionally intrudes upon the narrative.

As a result, certain elements of the story do not quite convince - Anna's mother tells her Martha's husband has left her in a lot of debt, and she wants John Law to bail her out (a rather implausible request, since Anna is investigating him for fraud); a little girl of nine, Nathan's friend, uses phrases like: "We were friends from way back"; and the love that springs up between Law and Anna from their short, occasional meetings seems implausible, too.

Where Hill succeeds superbly, though, is in his description of London, a silver and black city, full of mercury colours and mechanical textures: "She bent down to feel the pavement. It was cool to the touch but dark and also clear she saw, under her own reflected face, the silicon chips. Hundreds and thousands of them, small as the tesserae in a mosaic". Full of glass reflections and fake surfaces, it is the perfect city for code-making, with its untraceable lines and hidden corners. It is a city that will betray love, but Hill offers it some redemption when Anna, unlike Orwell's Winston Smith, finds a liveable place in it at the end. Love might not conquer all, but in Hill's vision, it has a fighting chance.

Tobias Hill appears at the EIBF on Sunday, August 24 (4pm)

Copyright 2003 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.