Noir and SF have long been kissing cousins. Authors from Philip K. Dick through William Gibson have mined tropes of hardboiled crime fiction to lend their speculative stories a seediness that renders them more recognizable and offers readers a warning about where society might be headed. I’ve seen the future, these writers seem to be saying – it is murder.
Toronto-raised Adam Sternbergh adds to this tradition with his debut novel, about an anonymous denizen of a dystopian near-future New York City who goes by the nom-de-guerre Spademan. After terrorists set off a dirty bomb in Times Square, those New Yorkers who neither died in the blast nor fled the fallout find themselves in a rigidly stratified society, the poor inhabiting tent cities that have appeared in Central Park and elsewhere, while the über-rich lose themselves in the limnosphere, a kind of jacked-up version of the Internet, which offers customers the most tactile, realistic, full-body virtual-reality experience ever invented.
Spademan is an assassin for hire – a “garbageman” – who dispatches his victims with a box cutter. His new mark is an 18-year-old woman named Grace Chastity, the daughter of evangelist T.K. Harrow, who has found renown by offering users of the limnosphere a taste of heaven without the messy business of having to die first. Despite his misgivings, Spademan accepts the assignment to kill Grace (he’ll kill anyone, man or woman, so long as the victim has reached the age of majority), but when he discovers a potentially explosive secret she is harbouring, he finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of revenge and murder.
Sternbergh’s spare, fast-paced narrative is told in stripped-down, dialogue-heavy prose that recalls the urban grit of Richard Stark and Robert B. Parker; the early descriptions of New York after the bombing are vivid and scabrous. There is a good deal of violence in the novel, but this proves problematic in the scenes that take place in the virtual reality world of the limnosphere. A user can feel pleasure or pain during an excursion through the limnosphere, but there is no threat of injury or death to the physical body; as a result there is nothing really at stake for Spademan in these scenes, and the violence comes off as gratuitous. Moreover, certain important details of other characters’ experiences must be related by breaking out of the first-person narration Sternbergh employs for the bulk of the book; this proves awkward and jarring for the reader.
The marriage of speculative elements and a hardboiled story results in a propulsive read – the novel is too short to become boring or overly frustrating – but Sternbergh’s high concept often falls victim to details that are insufficiently worked out.