Surveillance, by Jonathan Raban

Clueless in Seattle as the age of paranoia dawns

In an era where we can access any current affair from a thousand different viewpoints - the blog comment, backed up by the YouTube clip, discovered in the e-mail newsletter that makes it to SkyNews - one feels like cheering wildly for an old-fashioned "social novel" like Surveillance. To sit with an artful, humane narrator like Jonathan Raban, and share his concerned gaze at an America gone nearly mad with paranoia, is time well spent. This is the second in his trilogy of Seattle novels, the first being the dot-boom threnody Waxwings. By now it's clear how Raban wants to filter the maelstrom of this United States of Insecurity.

Our guides will be struggling writers, artists and intellectuals, counterpointed by driven refugees from what Eric Hobsbawm called the "age of extremes", all trying to work and love in the Big Drizzle of Seattle. Raban's respect for his rounded characters redeems the slightly privileged, bourgeois-bohemian locus of Surveillance.

The novel begins with a bravura description of what looks like an urban terrorist attack - a dirty bomb exploding under a school bus - but turns out to be a training simulation, one of many public spectacles put on to chasten the citizenry. We view the rivers of fake blood from the perspective of Tad Zachary, an underemployed actor making his living from these events, whose self-loathing is further fuelled by his web-surfing of anti-American blogs. Yet Tad, gay and mourning his deceased HIV-positive partner, is also the loving head of his elective family unit: Lucy, a writer for upscale magazines, and her iPod-enveloped yet spirited daughter Alida. In a climate where panicked evacuations of sports stadiums and even good old-fashioned earthquakes threaten equilibrium, Raban does a beautiful job of showing how "doing family" can survive any tremor, natural or human.

The motor of the story is Lucy's commission to write a profile on the elusive August Vanags, a retired Latvian professor who has penned a bestselling memoir of his time scrabbling for survival in wartime Poland. Vanags rigorously argues the Western side in the "clash of civilisations", a neocon patriot to a fault. Raban reaches for the Second World War as an experience of terror and catastrophism that might illuminate our pathologies.

Yet Surveillance uses this as an excursus on lies and detection. With tools such as the Google search, Lucy finds enough evidence to make her doubt Vanags' veracity. Meanwhile, an enraged Tad is using the web to discover the real identity of their scary Chinese landlord Mr Lee - an "economic man" who derives his philosophy from biographies of Wal-mart founders and Who Moved My Cheese?

Raban has enough fidelity to his characters, and to reality, to leave them in delicate states of indecision at the end. Remember all those paranoid postmodern conspiracy fictions: Pynchon, Ballard, DeLillo? Now, all it takes is a classical realist in Seattle to walk the streets, watch the news, listen to the conversations, and you get the same effect. Surveillance is as useful and eloquent a meditation on the extremism of the present as you would wish to curl up with on a long weekend.

Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (Macmillan)