Déjà Vu by Ian Hocking
Ian Hocking’s debut novel from a non-genre small press has attracted a fair amount of critical attention. It is a nearish-future thriller set twenty years hence with a pretty good hook. Saskia Brandt is an agent with the European FIB. Dragged back from holiday for an important case she returns to office to find her secretary has been stabbed to death and stuffed into the fridge. The crime has been committed in such a way as to frame her but as Brandt races to solve the murder before internal affairs become involved she realises that maybe she is more implicated than she thought. At the same time there’s still her original case, involving Professor David Proctor. On the other side of the Channel, and in the other narrative thread, Proctor is drawn back to the secret government lab in West Lothian where his wife was killed in an unsolved terrorist act.
Unfortunately as a thriller it falls flat. After the promising set-up we move into a long, flaccid section that makes up the bulk of the book. This only exists to bring Proctor and Brandt together; it adds nothing but only serves to bring out Hocking’s weaknesses as a novelist. Primarily this is the fact that all his characters speak with the same voice. The book than accelerates for a rushed and confusing ending. And if it doesn’t work as a thriller, it doesn’t work as sf either. By the end Hocking has introduced three major sf tropes, which is decidedly over ambitious since he never gets round to fully exploring any of them.
There are a lot of little niggles throughout - why would law enforcement officers carry revolvers, obsolete even now? would a sergeant in the British Army really introduce herself to a civilian as ‘Caroline’? - but more than this there is a general lack of plausibility in the underlying plot. It is a book where you have to wait till the very final pages to discover the meaning of what has happened. Once you arrive, though, the answer isn’t very satisfying.
This review originally appeared in Interzone #200.
Unfortunately as a thriller it falls flat. After the promising set-up we move into a long, flaccid section that makes up the bulk of the book. This only exists to bring Proctor and Brandt together; it adds nothing but only serves to bring out Hocking’s weaknesses as a novelist. Primarily this is the fact that all his characters speak with the same voice. The book than accelerates for a rushed and confusing ending. And if it doesn’t work as a thriller, it doesn’t work as sf either. By the end Hocking has introduced three major sf tropes, which is decidedly over ambitious since he never gets round to fully exploring any of them.
There are a lot of little niggles throughout - why would law enforcement officers carry revolvers, obsolete even now? would a sergeant in the British Army really introduce herself to a civilian as ‘Caroline’? - but more than this there is a general lack of plausibility in the underlying plot. It is a book where you have to wait till the very final pages to discover the meaning of what has happened. Once you arrive, though, the answer isn’t very satisfying.
This review originally appeared in Interzone #200.