Abstract
You do not need to be familiar with the breakthroughs of neuroscience to be grasped by Closed Horizon, the first novel by Peter Lantos, author of the praised memoir Parallel Lines. That is not only because the scientific advances portrayed in the year of 2032 are very realistic and well explained by an actual clinical neuroscientist. The main reason is that, although the plot deals with science and takes place in the future, this novel is everything but an ordinary ‘sci-fi’ story. Behind a political plot involving murder and the power of controlling human minds, the book discusses human behaviour and the notions of privacy, security, freedom, the role of the state and the prices we have to pay to maintain – or acquire – those things.
The action is centred on Mark Chedwick, a psychiatrist conducting experiments designed to influence the process of decision-making in human subjects. The author excises all unnecessary awe surrounding a scientific breakthrough, easily avoiding the ‘mad weird scientist’ cliché. The hero has to deal with ordinary issues like laboratory budgets, government funding and academic politics, which, instead of posing like boring subjects, add reality to the plot and increase our sympathy for him. Another good thing is the proximity of the chosen time setting and the political consequences of present events. The escalade of terrorism that we experience today has led to a Surveillance State in the Republic of Great Britain – the crown stepped out democratically a few years before the action takes place. The cameras that already watch all over London at present are, in the novel, really everywhere. The most disturbing aspect of this dystopia is that it is not an obvious fascist Big Brother. It is felt like something desired by many: a fair price to pay for security. Lantos is very successful in building such a world with a minimum of strangeness – no spaceships across Piccadilly, no blatant differences from today. That raises many thoughts about our own time: as we grow more individualistic as persons, many people give their privacy away gladly, as seen in reality shows and virtual social networks. Also, at the same time as everything seems to be getting global and ‘free’, right-wing extremism is gaining strength in many places. How many of us would really oppose a programme that could control the minds of criminals?
This social questioning is performed, in Closed Horizon, by Chadwick’s girlfriend, Yasmina, an Indian-British history teacher and researcher. Interestingly, it seems that these two characters can be combined to produce a composite alter ego of Peter Lantos. Many of his concerns and first-hand knowledge comes from his own professional life – as a neuroscientist – and personal life – as a Hungarian immigrant who survived a concentration camp and a communist dictatorship.
The book’s cast is vividly constructed, as is the physical setting: the city of London, with its exquisite blend of shiny modernity and misty tradition, is a character itself. As a matter of fact, it seems to be the humanity in everything that fascinates Lantos, and that permeates the entire book. Science is not treated with technocratic distance, but as a cultural, human creation that is subject to vested interests and exists in a historical context.
Last but not least, the book is fun! The aforementioned considerations are subtle, allowing the reader to enjoy it with different and/or shifting focuses, from political thriller to science fiction, from medical novel to social literature. You may not have asked yourself about those subjects yet, but you will not leave this book without a second thought about the human mind, science’s efforts to understand it and surveillance cameras.