Book Review: 'Tracer' by Stuart Jackson
‘Tracer’ (301 pp.) was published by Sphere (UK) in 1990, with cover art by Mark Salwowski. Information on Stuart Jackson is scant; according to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, he was a UK teacher who died in 2006. ‘Tracer’ was his only published novel.
‘Tracer’ is set in February 1990 in a dystopian UK ruled by the fascist British National Democratic Party (BNDP). The BNDP has come into power due to public fear over the spread of AIDS / HIV, and has exploited that fear to suspend civil liberties. The population is subject to a mandatory curfew, checkpoints on major roadways, restrictions on movement into or out of designated geographical zones, and mandatory blood testing for HIV status. Those who test positive are remanded to ‘Special Care Centres’ where they are held in indefinite quarantine.
Those who fail to report to a Centre following a positive blood test are targeted by the ‘tracers’ of the Special Health Authority (SHA), a government agency devoted to finding and detaining infected individuals.
In the opening pages of ‘Tracer’ we are introduced to the protagonist, Nick Gorman, a man in his late thirties who sees his job with the SHA as a distraction from the various personal tragedies that have upended his life. While Nick is eager to earn the bounties that come with tracing and detaining runners, he is at heart a liberal and humanist who is deeply uneasy with the ideology of the BNDP and its persecution of gays, bisexuals, Pakis, black people, and other minorities.
The main plot of ‘Tracer’ gets underway about 16 pages in: Nick is given a hush-hush tasking by Smithson, his supervisor, to locate a homosexual named Jonothan Harris. Gorman conscientiously applies his skills as a Tracer, and soon finds Harris. However, as he tails his quarry, a series of events bring an unwilling Gorman into a swirl of political intrigues……..the kind of intrigues that involve the use of silenced handguns, and corpses floating in the Thames……..
I finished ‘Tracer’ thinking that it would have benefitted from being a good 50 pages shorter in length. The novel’s opening third does a good job of presenting a near-future UK in the grip of fear and loathing over a deadly communicable disease, and Jackson wisely keeps the plot from becoming overly complicated.
However, too much of the narrative is devoted to lengthy interior monologues in which Nick Gorman muses over the misfortunes of his life, or exhaustively ruminates on the various wrinkles of the conspiracy he has been thrust into. The latter third of the novel is overly reliant on hairs-breadth escapes and well-timed coincidences, culminating in a denouement that wraps things up a bit too neatly for my tastes.
The novel also suffers from a preachy tenor that becomes grating after a while; yes, state-sponsored persecution of those unfortunate to be infected with HIV is immoral, but there is no need to remind the reader of this, accompanied by various bromides and pieties, on a continuous basis………
That said, ‘Tracer’ retains interest by juxtaposing its treatment of a UK determined to use any and all measures to control an infectious disease, with the current situation involving the covid-19 epidemic in the UK and the tactics of the Johnson government. Are the strictures detailed in ‘Tracer’ all that far-fetched or unlikely as we pass into the third year of the epidemic, and the rise of the Omicron Strain ? Here is where ‘Tracer’ offers food for thought, and in this wise, I recommend it as a solid three-star novel.
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