Book Review: Whole Wide World

Book Review: 'Whole Wide World' by Paul McAuley

4 / 5 Stars

'Whole Wide World' first was printed in 2001 in hardcover. This mass market paperback (376 pp.) was issued by Tor in December, 2003. The cover design is by Drive Communications.

'Whole Wide World' utilizes a near-future setting: a dystopian United Kingdom of the mid-2010s, several years after the 'InfoWar', a mass riot perpetrated by antifas, nearly eliminated the nation's telecommunications grid. 

A more repressive and authoritarian UK government now uses multiple cyber-police agencies to monitor content on the Web. The Autonomous Distributed Expert Surveillance System (ADESS), a massive network of CCTV cameras, scrutinizes the streets of London to deter antisocial behavior. Checkpoints control access to selected areas of the city, and the police have a less than cordial relationship with the populace they serve.

The protagonist of 'Whole Wide' is a middle-aged policeman named John (his surname never is disclosed) who works for T12, the London police force's cybercrime investigative unit. John formerly had a high-profile position with the police's Hostage and Extortion Unit, but has fallen from grace, and now works as one of numerous T12 officers investigating cybercrimes (such as the distribution of digital pornography).

When John, in his capacity as a computer expert, is called to the scene of the brutal murder of a coed he discovers that the murdered girl, Sophie Booth, was performing erotic pantomimes for an online audience. Not content to serve a mere supportive role as the T12 liaison to the homicide team, John embarks on his own, unsanctioned investigation of the murder. 

So doing will bring him into conflict with powerful people in the U.K. government; a systems engineer whose designs for ADESS go far beyond simple surveillance; and the amoral world of online sleaze merchants, merchants who are quite willing to use violence to deter anyone who is asking the wrong kinds of questions.............

I finished 'Whole Wide World' thinking it a sold 4-star modern cyberpunk novel. Author McAuley's London is a reasonably accurate extrapolation given the state of the Information Age as of 2001, when the book was published. The villains are sufficiently odious to make John's dogged pursuit understandable, and the ins and outs of the criminal investigation process and the accompanying bureaucracy are convincingly rendered (McAuley published a crime thriller, 'Players', in 2007, signaling his familiarity with the genre).

Where 'Whole Wide' seemed to lose momentum was in its length; at 376 pages, the process of learning Whodunit is protracted, and although the identity of the murderer is provided around the novel's halfway point, lots of attention remains to be given to the wider theme of the disturbing implications of having the modern Surveillance State manipulated by those with nefarious motives. 

The final 100 pages of 'Whole Wide' are dependent on rather uninspired plot devices (such as having villains easily suborned into giving rants in which they disclose their guilt, and having John increasingly prone to committing bullheaded actions which, coincidently, prevent the narrative from getting too sluggish). 

The novel's transition into a detective novel, rather than a cyberpunk novel, in its closing chapters left me with the impression that an opportunity to do something particularly offbeat and imaginative with 'Whole Wide World' likely had been missed. Hence, my 4-star Review.