"Every trick in the book" by Iain Hood

 In a world where no-one can be trusted, how can we know the truth?

Paul is an undercover cop who, twenty years ago, married Julia in order to infiltrate and spy on left-wing activists; now he is in danger of being exposed. What effect will this have on his wife and their two children?

But this is not just the story of one exposed undercover cop. It doubles down. Just suppose that someone is spying on the spy. Hood's CCTV-stuffed London is a Kafkaesque world in which the questions are: who can we trust, what can we believe, and how can any system cope with all that information? Conspiracy theories, even though they may be justified, breed paranoia and paranoid delusions are, as Paul discovers, symptomatic of certifiable mental illness. Misinformation and disinformation may or may not result in real-life tragedies, such as a child catching measles because the parent refused the MMR vaccine. As with quantum physics, when solidity is an illusion, where can we find firm ground on which to base our beliefs?

Hood doesn't use just narrative to make his point. Sentence segments are blanked out, as if the record has been censored. Blank pages parenthesise a section whose pages become increasingly grey as the streams of consciousness of the family members become increasingly turbulent and intermixed. At one stage Paul finds himself thinking "incomplete things. He is also looking out of the." The descriptions of the first few pages are revisited in a much more sinister way. A confusing section of dialogue is 'replayed' with character tags. Even the chapter numbers are playful, counting up in the first section, down in the second, and up again in the third. It's cryptic and it's clever and it's fun.

There are some very humorous bits as well. I loved the fact that all the policemen in London seemed to be Scottish ... after all, they work in Scotland Yard. A psychiatric report on Paul consistently misspells 'etc' as "ect" (hinting at ECT: electroconvulsive therapy?) And I enjoyed the references to 'uncle' Douglas MacDougal (eg 2.17), a character who appears in Hood's first book This Good Book (and later it is suggested that Paul writes a book entitled "This Good Cop"; 2.9)

As Paul tries to explain: “Everybody knows the price of freedom is eternal surveillance.” (3.13) This, of course, is a deliberate misquote. Thomas Jefferson said that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. But that's the point of this clever and convoluted book.

Selected quotes:

• “If finding out where the neo-Nazis in society are camped, then Neighbourhood Watch is the right way to go about it. Other than that, fucking rubbish. Fucking Stasi.” (1.14)
• “If all the cameras on walls are achieving anything at all, and it isn't achieving any more security for us, it's just saying we're behind our big walls and big gates and concrete blocks and we're scared shitless about all you scrotes outside them.” (1.14)
• “Behind big bad scary Wizard of Oz is people doing spreadsheets.” (1.14)
• “There's a weird thing to being mental, Paul is thinking, you look as though you have superhuman strength.” (2.12)
• “He's the fine figure of a man when he can be arsed.” (2.9)
• “Maybe the horrible truth is we live in a culture where young women and some young men have become so confused by relationships they see the only way forward from a bad relationship is taking the other person to court charged with it.” (3.13)

September 2024; 191 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God