Douglas Preston is one of those authors who writes adventure/thriller fiction, but with a central idea drawn from science to make it feel a bit bigger and more important than just the usual Jack Reacher-type shoot-up. This sub-genre of fiction can work very well, with Michael Crichton one of its earliest and best leading lights with tales meshing alien bacteria, nanotechnology, the cloning of extinct animals etc. into compelling and exciting tales. Preston is in that vein, and his previous works include Relic which was made into a feature film in the 1990s.
In this book, first published in 2008, the science hook is the Large Hadron Collider (although for plot reasons this is an American version called Isabella and not the CERN one in Switzerland.) And yes, like all stories from two years ago about the LHR, once running it starts to produce mini black holes and there’s a giant explosion, which will doubtless annoy the heck out of Professor Brian Cox.
But the book’s main focus is less the science than it is faith, and the interplay between the two, which brings it more into Dan Brown country. Here, a group of Evangelical Christians fear that Isabella’s investigation of the Big Bang is intended to disprove God, and so they march on it; meanwhile the scientists find that the mini black holes that Isabella has created is allowing them to talk to … Someone. But who? An extraterrestrial intelligence? God? A computer AI – possible a sentient Isabella? Or is it some sort of malicious hacker seeking to fool them all?
It’s the answer to this that most seems to fascinate Preston, and to be honest his interest in this aspect means that other parts of the novel go underdeveloped: strands set in Washington DC could easily have been done without and seem to be there to take up space and pad the thing out, and the President’s decisions are absurd (casually deploying the army on US soil, which would contravene the US constitution and see him impeached); there are some poorly thought-through details (the story breaks overnight, when most TV channels would take a few hours to rouse reporters and do any sort of coverage, but here’s it’s an instant media storm at 4am …) But the biggest flaw is that the main protagonist (Wyman Ford, who recurs in Preston’s later novel Impact) does essentially nothing. He’s a tourist, someone for the reader to identify with, yet his effect on the story is entirely negligible. Events merely unfold around him, and he reacts.
That leaves the book feeling oddly unsatisfying, which is a shame because the eventual handling of the messages from Isabella is fairly intelligent and thought provoking in aspects of science and the roots of faith. Admittedly some of it is rather sci-fi/70s New Age in its philosophies and it won’t win many friends from the religious groups or indeed the scientists, but if you can stick with it then it delivers a fairly decent resolution. However, by the end my overwhelming reaction was along the lines of: “Oh, is that it, then?”
I’d give it a solid but unspectacular *** out of 5.
