Fiction Reviews
Where the Axe is Buried
(2025) Ray Nayler, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £15.99, trdpbk, 327pp, ISBN 978-1-399-62789-4
Set in a near/alternate future (one that is perhaps too close for comfort), Ray Nayler’s latest novel presents us with a series of characters negotiating their way through the breakdown of civilisation. Lest that sound entirely too clichéd, let me hastily add that Nayler not only gives new twists to both the causes and consequences of this breakdown, but also writes so as to ensure the reader’s focus remains on the characters, with the technological elements, as interesting as they are, held back as merely bit-players in the drama.
So, the book opens with Zoya, a former dissident, who has been sentenced to internal exile within The Federation (clearly a stand-in for Russia). She is approached by a (literally) shadowy figure working for a (figuratively) shadowy group who, of course, want to bring down the oppressive State. And the mechanism they’ve chosen to do this involves copying Zoya’s consciousness and projecting it into the brain of the President. Whose consciousness has itself been decanted into a succession of bodies, as each breaks down in turn, despite the ministrations of Nikolai, a doctor who only wants to return to his beloved family in Italy. The idea, then, is that Zoya’s consciousness will infiltrate and eventually overcome the President’s and force the downfall of the regime.
Also trapped within the Federation is Lilia, a brilliant computer scientist/physicist. While studying overseas, in ‘the Union’ (that is, the U.K.), she discovered a way of not only mapping someone’s state of mind but also implanting thoughts which the subject would then think were their own. This is achieved through a sprinkling of ‘quantum woo’, with ‘entanglement’ being the scientific term du jour in this, the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology.
Lilia, however, has made the mistake of returning home to see her ailing father one last time and is now prohibited from leaving again. She too is then picked up by a shadowy group - although whether this is the same one is not entirely clear - and taken to a house that has been literally printed deep in the taiga, where she is commanded to perfect her technique so it can also be used to bring down the regime. By this point I was beginning to wonder if bringing down the regime was over-determined - after all, if you can use quantum entanglement to plant unseemly and ultimately disastrous desires in the President’s mind, why would you need to project an entire consciousness into it?
Nevertheless, such ponderings don’t impede the pace of the narrative, which shifts again, this time to Nurlan, a parliamentary aide trapped by a mob in a government building in ‘The Republic’, a country adjacent to the Federation (perhaps Kazakhstan). And the reason for the rioting is that the local ‘PM’ - a form of AI used around the world to ‘rationalise’ government decision making - has basically gone completely and catastrophically off the rails, doubling energy prices every couple of hours. Poor Nurlan is then duped into allowing this rogue AI, or some part thereof, to escape its sandbox and, by means also left unclear, to crash all such PMs across Europe, creating widespread chaos and destruction.
What these chapter by chapter shifts in character and location then allow is a discursive comparison of different forms of oppression, whether via the one-man rule of the President in the Federation or the rationalised market adjustments of the PM in the Union, both of which constrain the population, albeit with different degrees of severity. And the conclusion reached, it seems, is a Luddite-tinged one, namely that some measure of satisfaction, if not outright happiness, can be achieved by throwing away our mobile devices, abandoning our self-driving cars and making human connections again. Of course, the cost in terms of death and devastation would be enormous, as it is within the novel and the glimpse of hopeful light with which the story ends is nevertheless one that is limned by the darkness of the tunnel humanity must pass through. Still, Nayler raises a number of thought-provoking issues regarding both the personal costs of resistance and the societal costs of regime change and he does so in an engaging and eminently readable manner.
Steven French
Jonathan has also reviewed Where the Axe is Buried.
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