Well, this is a first.

Lately--over the past couple of years or so--I increasingly find myself starting books and not finishing them.
I used to think this was heresy, only slightly more defensible than the grave sin of skipping to the back of the book to see how it ends. But I'm older now. There comes a point in any novel where I lift myself out of the story and ask myself, "Do I care?" And quite often now, I don't.
A slow-moving plot doesn't faze me; in fact, some of my favourite books meander along at a snail's pace. All I need is one character whose fate concerns me, one way or another.

But in all my reading life, I've never been confronted with a situation where I identify more with the villains than the heroes. Such is the case with The Fourth Realm, by John Twelve Hawks.

The first installment of the trilogy, The Traveller, was quite entertaining in a Matrix-meets-1984 kind of way. In the novel, governments are portrayed as unwitting puppets of a vast, shadowy organization called "The Tabula" or "The Brethren", whose goal is Jeremy Bentham's Virtual Panopticon on a worldwide scale: constant surveillance of every citizen on earth. Our heroes, the "Travellers", seek to subvert the Tabula by peaceful means; their allies and protectors, the "Harlequins", are considerably more violent.

John Twelve Hawks is quite the enigma: publically, very little is known about him--in fact, nobody seems to know if that's his real name. He claims to live "off the Grid", by which he means his existence is as untraceable as he can make it. Supposedly he communicates via satellite phone, doesn't own a television...and yet he has a website, a rather spectacular website. I smell a publicity stunt.

Amidst the quasi-Buddhist cosmology and mysticism in this series, there is plenty of meat about the "culture of fear" (so necessary for control), and the free and easy way so many people hand over aspects of their freedom to government and corporations. If you believe the novel, or the material on Twelve Hawks' website, the technology necessary for total survellance is not very far off. The more you read into this series, the more disquieted you are supposed to become.

And yet I found myself, more and more, welcoming the idea of a virtual Panopticon. This is not a new sentiment with me. I once mounted a spirited defense of Big Brother in front of my Grade Ten English class. People thought me nuts then; people still think I'm nuts now.

I hasten to add that even then, I conceded that "Big Brother" was a grossly perverted version of a fundamentally sound (to my mind) philosophy. And I was eventually wrestled to the intellectual mat by the repeated assertion that, given Big Brother technology, Orwell's dystopian vision is all but inevitable. It's much like Communism that way. From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs is a beautiful precept that always seems to be distorted to evil ends. Here's another: What would Jesus Do? That one almost always magically morphs into What Would I Do If I Were Jesus?

Robert J. Sawyer, in his excellent Neanderthal Parallax, presents a society in which each citizen wears what's called a Companion. Your Companion implant records everything you see, say and do, sending it all to a vast, ultrasecure database called an alibi archive. Your alibi archive records are accessible to you at any time, and to the authorities only when you have been accused of a crime. Of course, there are those who choose to leave their Companions wide open to public viewing 24/7: called Exhibitionists, each of them wears silver at all times (so you know who they are) and each has a devoted cult following...the ultimate reality show. But these people aside, your Companion/alibi archive link is yours alone.
The benefits of such an approach ought to be self-evident. Crime is virtually unheard of (serious crime, in this society, is punished by sterilization of the offender and anyone sharing fifty percent of his or her genes). Any crime that is committed is easily solved; framing someone for a crime is almost impossible. After a few generations, the very idea of criminality is almost expunged--what would be the point, when you know you're going to be found out? No one ever goes missing; your Companion functions as something like an ultra-deluxe Blackberry device to help you solve problems and instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere.

This is sort of an anti-Fourth Realm kind of series, positing the idea that "total information awareness" is not necessarily a bad thing. It's also one of probably very few novels ever written that takes this view...which happens to be mine.

I have always believed that the desire for privacy is, on some level, kind of bizarre. I mean, what are you doing that you're afraid somebody might see? The only non-criminal acts I can think of that people want total privacy for tend to be sexual. Masturbation, for instance. While I'm not arguing for giant public masturbation sessions, let's get real: anyone who claims to have never masturbated is lying. Where's the shame in something so common? In a sane world, catching somebody masturbating would induce no awkwardness...it wouldn't even rate mentioning.

Freedom? We're all prisoners in some way, not of government or some organization acting behind the scenes, but of ourselves. We're slaves to convention, to time, to the almighty dollar sign. Freedom is a state of mind: like all states of mind, it exists independant of external surroundings. This is a lesson most of the human race has yet to learn. Once we do learn this lesson, it will be understood that freedom can not be bought and sold, taken or given away.

This is where I think John Twelve Hawks has it wrong. He's crafted a world where there's lots of freedom from, and imbued every "right-thinking" person in it with the desire for loads more "freedom to". Given the choice, I'll take freedom from every time. Maybe that makes me an odd duck, a traitor to the human race. It also makes it very difficult to finish this book.