A novice police officer assigned to watch over a refugee group tries to find out if the refugees have been charged with terrorism – and where the real killers lurk† Technically, this is an accurate description of the plot of David Musgrave’s debut novel, Lambda† Sounds like a pretty basic pot boiler, right? But from the first page, Lambda plans something odd and impractical, dropping a linear narrative and setting the story in an alternate universe Britain where you can get into trouble with the police for damaging a talking toothbrush.
In LambdaIn the bizarre world of 2019, advancements have been made in the field of artificial intelligence to the point that “sensitive objects” have been given rights, including the toothbrush, also known as the ToothFriendIV. Meanwhile, police are testing an AI system that would both accuse someone of a crime and go ahead and kill them, though the government prefers to call it that. mitigation, neutralization, deactivationor closure of the agency† It may sound like a Philip K. Dick pastiche, but Musgrave’s debut is more ambitious than the tropes it borrows, arranging them in original, gripping literary sci-fi.
Lambda follows a cop named Cara Gray as she becomes all too familiar with the official slang for murder. She joins the police force after abruptly swapping the life of an activist in a left-wing commune for detective work, then becomes entangled in a shadowy government program involving a rogue cybercrime in the desert called the Republic of Severax. Her personal life is just as messy as her professional entanglements. She dates a misanthropic coder named Peter who is obsessed with two things, neither of which are: a talking toothbrush and Severax. (Musgrave shades in a nice portrait of a specific kind of dirty tech with Peter, whose main personality trait is interrupting documentaries to add his two cents.)
Cara is no futuristic Colombo – she is remarkably, movingly bad at her job. After her first assignment as a police officer goes awry, she is transferred to a project to monitor lambdas, a population of about 100,000 mysterious humans who are genetically human but have evolved to be miniscule in size and semi-aquatic, with tails instead of legs. and an inscrutable social structure. By the time she is set on this rhythm, a widespread institutional effort has already been made to integrate these lambdas into society. We learn that they started arriving on the coasts of Iceland and the UK several years earlier, with only foggy knowledge of how they got there. They know that they swam from somewhere and that they had to avoid hungry Greenland sharks during their journey; some of them speak vaguely of their parents, who are known only as the “Four Fertile Pairs.”
In the years since they started appearing, the lambdas have taken on a status similar to that of refugees, with government support to help them move around and find housing and jobs. But anti-Lambda sentiment continues to grow as Cara gets to know the beleaguered population, who live in deliberately flooded basement apartments and call each other “brothers” and “sisters.” They are often attacked on the way to their low-paid service jobs, and many have become skittish. Cara bonds with an eccentric, friendly lambda named Gavin, who is desperate to learn more about his parents – and whose fear of being murdered by angry, xenophobic “landy” vigilantes is growing by the day. Though her supervisor expressly forbids it, Cara agrees to get in touch with an Icelandic researcher who could help Gavin discover his sunken roots.
That’s a lot of plot to follow, and Musgrave’s stylistic choices are as byzantine as his narrative. Using alien figures as an allegory for an oppressed populace isn’t exactly groundbreaking — it probably accounts for about half of sci-fi — but the writing itself is bright, bold, and proudly odd. The passages that trace Cara’s journey from activist to agent and almost back again are interrupted by advertising-style pages informing the reader where we are with our “Free Trial of EyeNarrator Pro.” (These bits give off a strong scent of George Saunders’ short stories.) The first EyeNarrator passage indicates that the story we’re reading is software-generated prose, and Musgrave hints at this not-quite-human narration through strikingly foreign language choices. . The characters’ blood pressure levels are mentioned and movements are described in strange technical language: “Carolyn turned 12 degrees counterclockwise,” reads one sentence. Another: “Cara’s eye saccades took in the woman’s highly reflective brown irises.” This book may have set the world record for using the word ‘saccade’, which is surprisingly common considering it’s something no one ever says.
There is also a series of monologues – the book opens and closes with them, and they are scattered everywhere – of a mysterious character called “Mr. Hello.” These stilted, melancholy monologues describe Mr. Hello’s unconventional upbringing and solitary lifestyle and are reminiscent of the host’s interview scenes in west world, when the naive robots gleefully rattle off truths they don’t really have access to. In fact, tonally, Lambda has a lot in common with west world, good and bad – it’s overcrowded, intelligent, at times heavy and sometimes gets completely out of hand. The biggest disappointment of Lambda is the ending, which lacks the satisfying ending of a true grade A crime thread. Instead, it leaves a lot of loose ends – a whole margin of dropped plot points.
But where it fails to solve its mysteries effectively, Lambda dazzles in his ingenuity and ability to conjure mood. I only read it for the first time last week and I barely remember the wispy ending. But Musgrave’s evocative images from a strange world will linger.