Mullen, Thomas. The Revisionists [Mulholland, 2013]
The Meat
The Meat
I appreciate being treated like an adult. An author who writes a
book for adults, I appreciate that. I don’t need her holding my hand as I read,
explaining everything to me along the way. And I don’t need a story wrapped up
for me in a nice, neat little package. I can deal with ambiguity. I'm an adult, more or less.
“The new normal.” Given the nature of my research—in my
other life, the one where I get paid, barely—I read a lot about the War on
Terror. This trite expression, “the new normal"—and its even more reprehensible
cousin, “Nine-eleven changed everything”—signaled the depths of the changes the
world was undergoing, supposedly. Threat levels, chatter, gut-thinking: as in
most things, the experts who assured us of this new normal were wrong. The Bush
Years, with its alternating hysteria and militarism, was a moment in history
ushering in, rather haphazardly, something far more nefarious, the Obama
Administration. This is the new normal. No menacing plots, no color coded
threat levels. The terrorist is no longer the garish, omnipresent fiend intent
on destroying us. He simply is. The new normal is not hysteria following every
vague threat, but rather a constant reality, one that hardly merits attention.
The War on Terror, no longer named as such, as finally come into its own.
Oh yes, the review.
I’ll just come out and write it: I really liked The Revisionists. A deeply political
novel with very little politicking, the book is critical without preaching, a
commentary on the War on Terror, driven nevertheless by an actual plot. Zed is
an agent with the Department of Historical Integrity. His job is simple: He
must ensure that the tragedy of history remains tragic—that atrocities,
massacres, genocides happen the way
they’re supposed to happen. Otherwise, the “Perfect Present” that is the
distant future will not be. "Hags," archaic and anachronistic agents driven by
the old superstitions—religion, nation, race—threaten the Perfect Present
through their time-travelling revisionism. i.e. killing Hitler so there’s
no Holocaust. Zed is sent to today’s Washington D.C. to ensure that something
called “the Great Conflagration” occurs as it is supposed to occur.
In The Revisionists,
Thomas Mullen weaves this sci-fi-esque plot into a more grounded—and perhaps
more familiar, though maybe not—reality of government spying, a
persistent “war” lurking somewhere just out of sight, a war fought by misguided
youth and mercenary contractors. Caught up in Zed’s mission is Tasha, a lawyer
haunted by her own compromises and the death of her soldier brother; Leo, a
former CIA agent whose frontline assignment against terrorism taught him quite
a bit, but not enough; and Sari, a young Indonesian girl “working for”—or
rather enslaved by—a Korean diplomat and his deeply damaged wife.
First off, the book is a good read. I usually begin tuning
out from a book around page 230. I didn’t start flipping forward to see how
many pages remained until 370—with only 65 pages ahead of me. This, perhaps more
than anything, is all that matters in terms of a review.
Mullen deserves some points for one thing in particular: his
nonwhite cast of characters. Only Leo is white. But this never feels like an
afterthought, akin to their style of dress or taste in music. Rather, the characters’
ethnicity is used as a means for commenting on our racial obsessions and
paranoia—particular when Zed encounters white people whose whiteness is always
surprising. Like the book’s commentary on terrorism, security, privacy, etc.,
Mullen’s explorations into race are never inorganic, never preachy. And, more importantly, commentary never holds up the plot.
The book doesn’t really end, not in a way that will satisfy
our penchant for formula, for “resolution” of which the real world appears to
be in short supply. Mullen treats his readers like adults who live in that real
world, who can handle ambiguity, for whom walking away from a novel with
questions isn’t a bad thing, but an indication of a good work of art. I’m not
really sure how the book ended, and I am entirely unsure whether some of the
characters are who they claimed to be, or perhaps believed themselves to be.
And that’s a very, very good thing.
There’s more, but I have dinner plans. Read the book. You’ll
feel like you learned something. What it is, I’m not entirely sure.
The Math
Objective score: 8/10
Bonuses: +1 for acknowledging that not everyone is white
Penalties: None
Nerd coefficient: 9/10
