Golden State

Ben H. Winters

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, April 13th 2019

Ben H. Winters’ writing straddles the uneasy border between parody, satire, and homage. His classic/horror mashups Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and Android Karenina spawned a small army of imitators, as did his Worst Case Scenario handbooks, and he also does a nice line in humorously dystopian mysteries. His latest novel, an update of Fahrenheit 451 for the Fake News era, falls into the latter category and – almost – redeems his treatment of my beloved Austen.

The novel is set in the wake of an unspecified disaster whose origins rest in a society built on lies, in response to which the survivors have built a new world founded on reality. Such is their dedication to preserving reality that the State literally and figuratively stands on the verifiable truth; every aspect of life recorded, transcribed and archived in vast underground libraries and thus perpetually available for review. Idioms and humorous remarks are allowed since their intention and literal meaning can be inferred from context and familiarity, as are the innocuous and lubricating half-truths of social interaction, but any assault on reality, from deliberate dissemblance to aberrant natural phenomena such amnesia to madness, cannot and will not be tolerated.

Laszlo Ratesic is an officer in Speculative Services, an elite police force with the innate ability to detect mistruths ranging from the most minor of misrepresentations to the most blatant of lies. They are also sensitive to the presence of anomalies; mismatches of fact that may indicate that the real situation may be obscuring falsehood and, as their name implies, are the only citizens allowed to create hypothetical scenarios in order to test their plausibility and deduce the truth. Something of a loner, Laszlo is a dedicated officer with a failed marriage and a solid but unspectacular career. He also lives in the shadow of his older brother, whose death in the line of duty has rendered him legendary, making up for his perceived inadequacy by his dedication to the Service.

When he is assigned to mentor a new graduate he is far from happy, particularly when her enthusiasm leads her to see anomalies in the obviously accidental death that is their first assignment. But dedicated officer that he is, he considers it his duty to instill the proper discipline into his young charge and, as a training exercise, agrees to search the deceased’s house in search of possible discrepancies. Not only do they find that two weeks’ worth of the man’s daily self-reports are missing, but he has hidden in the bookshelf an illicit novel. Not “a true story…featuring a historical character or characters…suggesting or implying an inspirational message about the nature of the Golden State” but a work of fiction, a gross and deliberate violation of the Objectively So. Unable to resist temptation, Laszlo reads it and is exposed to a myriad of otherwise inconceivable possibilities. Subsequent investigations lead him to the horrifying conclusion that somebody in the highest echelons of power is deliberately falsifying reality in his world. But what can he do to counter actions that are unrecorded, unrecordable and hence, by definition, demonstrably untrue?

Imagine, one of the characters asks early in the book, what would happen “if every person was allowed the luxury of claiming their own truth, building a reality of their own in which they can live. Imagine the danger that would pose, how quickly the lies would metastasize, and the extraordinary threat that would pose to the world.” An inconceivable act in the world of the novel, such a proposition requires little by way of imagination in the real world of today. But, as Golden State makes all too clear, some solutions may be just as bad.