Surveillance by Jonathan Raban

Watching me, watching you

"Since childhood, Seattle had been Lucy's fabled emerald city of Oz." Now approaching the emotional vulnerabilities of middle age in a jittery, post-9/11 atmosphere, she finds that the red shoes no longer click their heels with quite such a magical effect. Lucy Bengstrom had grown up on a Montana ranch before eagerly taking the yellow brick road to Seattle and a heady freelance career profiling the likes of Bill Gates. With commissions now thinning out, Lucy jumps at GQ's lucrative offer for a piece on August Vanags, a local recluse since the huge success of his holocaust memoir. A tense lunch, with Lucy masquerading as an academic researcher, quickly reveals why Vanags's publishers marooned him on an island in the Seattle archipelago; Vanags's artless cheerfulness would have completely destroyed the emotionally gaunt persona that was needed to sell his harrowing book.

Tad Zachary, Lucy's platonic soul mate and surrogate father to her 11-year-old daughter Alida, remembers Vanags as a campus sex pest - so Lucy is on guard when Vanags insists she bring Alida along to subsequent lunches. Improbably, Alida warms to their disarmingly open host, which makes Lucy feel even worse for invading his privacy to snoop for her article. '"The more friendly you get with a subject, the more you feel like a spook,"' she laments.

Tad's reply - that we're all spooks now, with people even Googling their prospective dates - cuts to the quick of Surveillance, which fairly hums with both mundane and more sinister espionage. Lucy's snooping passes as professional. Alida, at that awkward age, cannot fathom the "human algebra" of adult relationships and so routinely records her mother's movements to see if the data will throw up a comprehensible pattern. Tad scrupulously monitors his own body for signs of Aids-related infection and, as a veteran protestor, he scans counter-culture blogs each night to fuel his rage against Government corruption. The administration itself plays an Orwellian hand, with anti-terrorist road blocks and theatrical disaster response exercises congesting Seattle. "How could you explain to a child that 'homeland security' meant keeping the homeland in a state of continuous insecurity?" Lucy wonders.

How indeed; Raban chooses not to try, and veers away from a raw satire of Bush's paranoid America. Raban emigrated to Seattle with his daughter in 1990, and has scrutinised American cultural history through several sharply observed travelogues since Old Glory, his 1981 journal of a voyage down the Mississippi. Most recently, A Passage to Juneau explored the coastline north of Seattle whilst elliptically meditating on Raban's own vulnerable, mid-life situation.

A similar introspection is the best feature of Surveillance, which generally lacks the punch of Raban's previous work. His four main characters are well-conceived but struggle to fire up to full potential on a thin plot. A security-obsessed landlord is a shallow stereotype of the Chinese stowaway-turned-entrepreneur, and a hollow re-working of Chick, a very similar but far more zesty character in Raban's last and excellent novel, Waxwings. The multiple layers of espionage are intriguing, to an extent, but have no natural resolution - and Raban pretty much clicks his heels to whip up a forceful, if tantalising, and in some ways rather annoying, denouement.