Things Fall Apart, but Data Lasts for Ever
By MATT THORNE
The Heritage By Will Ashon Faber Pounds 12.99
Surveillance society is a fascinating subject for contemporary novelists. As political commentators continue to argue the pros and cons of amassing so much information on individuals, and as developments in science allow for ever-increasing types of information to be collected and millions freely give up any sense of privacy in return for commercial pleasures, what fires the novelist’s imagination is how all this can be used for dramatic purposes. Will Ashon’s second novel explores this murky territory by looking at the commercial value of genetic knowledge for government databases.
With his first novel, Clear Water, Ashon established an unusual authorial voice, influenced by JG Ballard and David Mitchell but with a curious combination of English nostalgia and utterly contemporary observation entirely his own. This authorial voice is still present in The Heritage, but he also manages convincingly to inhabit both his female narrator, Tilly, an educated middle-class girl wrongly sent to a Young Offenders Institute, and her best friend Sadie, who speaks entirely in a street patois. Although Ashon is not explicit, the book seems to take place in the near future, with DVDs showing up as curious relics of their parents’ past.
The Heritage begins as a prison novel, with the two girls united by their interest in computers as they slowly begin to understand each other. When they are freed from the institute and their sinister landlady and social worker comes to take DNA swabs for a major scientific investigation into the genetic roots of criminal behaviour, Tilly switches the samples and it seems as if the novel is going to become a life-swap black comedy. But rather than concentrate solely on this familiar plot, Ashon uses it instead as the starting point for a bureaucratic black comedy, which given the recent governmental loss of over 7 million families’ personal details, seems all too relevant. When the reality is this disturbing, it’s hard for a novelist to better it, but Ashon comes close.
As with his debut, there are some great comic moments in all the darkness, including a hilarious X-rated take on A Clockwork Orange where Sadie’s brother Marcus is trapped in a sexual experiment that he refuses to leave because being shown pornography and being monitored 24 hours a day is the happiest he’s ever been. But beneath the satirical humour is an almost overwhelming sense of sadness; Ashon presents the world falling apart not because of the mendacity of others but merely their sloppiness. What makes this book more than another Orwell-inspired dystopian vision is his suggestion that it is not evil that creates the misery of others but human weakness, a point underscored by the novel’s final twist.
Although billed as a story about corporate malice, it is instead about the possible side-effects of creating systems of knowledge open to abuse. Ashon creates a paranoia thriller plot and then deliberately lets it all fall apart. In doing so, he manages to both confirm contemporary anxieties and ridicule them, beautifully capturing the uncertainty of our age.
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