Tales of text and death

Technology inspires a novel that, ironically, has trouble getting its message.

"Ali Bronski tried not to cry as her phone lit up. It sat in the middle of an empty floor and vibrated as it rang, like a beetle caught on its back." This sinister image points to Nick Walker's treatment of communication technologies in his first novel, Black Box, as both powerfully affecting yet powerless. As the title suggests, aeroplanes take centre stage as the most frightening form of technology. However, it is various voice-recording devices – answer machines, dictaphones, radio and the horrifying sounds caught on flight recorders – that really haunt Walker's story.

The novel's narrator is an ex-stewardess, Stephanie, who lost her job many years previously having assisted a woman, Lin, to stow away on a flight from Hong Kong to London. Lin died of hypothermia during the flight and this tragic event is the focus of the plot. Stephanie is not, however, the protagonist. It has 20 main characters who are linked through "six degrees of separation". As the story unwinds, we discover that all the characters are linked to Lin's death in some way.

These connections are brilliantly developed but the purpose of their unravelling is unclear. Walker seems to use the story of Lin's death to outline the ways in which technology separates us, while claiming to bring us together. Characters rarely speak directly, hearing one another through machines: over the phone, via a radio phone-in, through an intercom. Others hear one another on relaxation tapes or Tannoy announcements. In Stephanie's world people don't communicate; they can listen, but they cannot respond. Walker elucidates the links between people while affirming their disconnectedness.

The glossary of characters at the back of the book is a testimony to its confusing structure: the story is written in a series of numbered sections, which move back and forth between the characters' largely separate lives. The channel-hopping style of the writing is irritating to begin with, but once the connections emerge, Stephanie's MTV-level attention span is cleverly transformed into another one-sided communication mediated by technology.

Walker uses the rather worn idea of six degrees of separation to explore fears that manifest themselves through technology: fear of flying being one of the most common. At heart, this is of course a fear of death. The novel manages to deal with this subject in a darkly comic way. One of the characters, John Heron, is a stand-up comic whose act involves telling a few bad jokes, and then pretending to shoot himself. Ultimately, Walker does not ask you to laugh at death; but what exactly he asks his reader to think about is not very clear.

Black Box

Nick Walker

Review

£10.99

311pp