Joanna Kavenna

A travelogue visiting the possible locations of the stuff of legends had great promise but The Ice Museum doesn't quite deliver on that promise.

Where was the legendary Thule? The Shetlands, Iceland, Norway, Svalbard, Greenland? Kavenna visits them all, meeting the locals, weaving in mentions of Nansen, Burton and other explorers, and talking a lot about ice. There are some sections of great interest but too often I thought to myself "why has this bit been included, if not to pad the book out?" Case in point, the interview with a woman who was the wartime daughter of a Norwegian woman and German father; a tangential connection to Thule at best. I see a company named Thule manufactures baby strollers; I'm surprised Kavenna didn't pay the factory a visit.

The book was written too early to comment on the discovery of the solar system's most distant object, temporarily named Ultima Thule. We've missed out on a chapter of Kavenna attempting to hitch a ride on a spaceship on a mission to the cold classical Kuiper belt object.… (meer)

For most of the time I was reading Zed, I was drawn in by what Joanna Kavenna was doing. After all, here was a satirical novel that seemed ready to land some punches, and the scarcity of any contemporary authors pulling this off made it seem as though Zed might be a rare treat.

The story of Zed is set in a world that very much resembles our own, except that it is effectively run by a single behemoth of a company named Beetle - imagine Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all rolled into one. Kavenna gives Beetle even more power over the people, with algorithms to predict arrest people for future crimes, blanket surveillance of the population, "inspiration" (i.e. mind control) to persuade those in power, and complete control over the media.

Each of the main characters has a BeetleWatch that monitors their health, and an electronic personal assistant called a Veep. There is Douglas Varley (Veep: Scrace Dickens), an executive at Beetle who is in charge of the lifeline algorithms; Guy Matthias (Veep: Sarah Coates), the head of Beetle; his wife, Elska; David Strachey, the editor of The Times; Wiltshire Jones, a robot reporter; Frannie Amarensekera, a hacker whose skilled impressed Matthias into hiring her; and Eloise Jayne, the good-guy cop.

The "Zed" in the title basically refers to the principle of chaos and indeterminism. It first manifests when a guy named George Mann unexpectedly leaves work, gets very drunk, and murders his wife and two boys: none of this behavior had been predicted. Things are made worse when Beetle's bots go to arrest George Mann and end up killing Lionel Bigman in a case of mistaken identity.

Beetle is thrown into a crisis by the number of "zed" events that start to multiply as the narrative unfolds. Add to this picture the mysterious figure of Bel Ami, who sports multiple identities and is working with a group of hackers to subvert the Beetle system. The hackers somehow use water droplets to achieve this feat.

Zed is a novel that I really wanted to like, but as the story unfolded I became increasingly frustrated. First, there is far too much repetition - yes, it is amusing to be told, for instance, to point out the disparity between free choice and the obvious manipulations that Beetle undertakes, but the point is made over and over until the joke becomes stale.

The second problem I had with the novel is that, at a certain point, it was clear that Kavenna did not really know what to do with her story and her characters. What was going on, for instance, with Douglas Varley suddenly falling in love with Frannie? It simply made no sense, and did not move the narrative along at all. The water droplet hacking subplot was ridiculous. The conclusion was deeply unsatisfactory.

Despite showing glimpses of promise, Zed really failed to deliver as either a compelling or a critique of modern, technological society. As a novel, Zed takes a few confident steps, but ultimately fails to come close to the standard set by, for instance, Hari Kunzru's brilliant [b:Transmission|429653|Transmission|Hari Kunzru|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1311346343l/429653._SY75_.jpg|580863].… (meer)