Review
Mind’s Eye
2005
Simon & Schuster
Review by Peter Young in Vector #243 (2005).
McAuley’s currently occupied niche of the mainstream science thriller has lately seen him mining a rich seam of material from a variety of scientific disciplines, almost making light of the fact that he has a better scientific pedigree – especially in the context of its believable application to fiction – that many of his contemporaries. If that all sounds too terribly serious and business-like, McAuley is also smart enough to remind us he can be a dab hand at the knowing wink and the meaningful nudge too when he wants to: it’s meant to be fun, after all, and Mind’s Eye is most certainly that.
The plot begins as a straightforward enough London urban mystery: a number of ‘glyphs’ have been appearing throughout the city, graffitied symbols that have origins in ancient history and a power to unleash damaging mental demons in those susceptible to their influence. The secret services know about them, a clandestine international group wants the secret of their power for themselves, but ahead of all this a London photographer with a family secret that gave him a lifelong sensitivity to the glyphs has found his vulnerability to them unexpectedly reawakened, and he is drawn into a search for their creator and a mystery than goes deeper and further than he could ever have suspected.
The time and setting is bang up-to-date, being post-Iraq invasion, a point of some relevance to the unexpected direction Mind’s Eye takes. There’s also a Heart of Darkness structure to its X-Files-like plot; McAuley then pours on a heavy Spooks sensibility and serves it up as the Saturday night TV movie. For good measure he throws in a group of particularly believable characters and sets them up against the kind of rakish villainy that is on show in just about any Robert Ludlum novel, though what McAuley can evidently do well (that others do less successfully) is write some distinctly British quirkiness to his characters. Combining all the foregone, the resulting mix is rather intoxicating. The strongest sense of place in Mind’s Eye is given not so much to London itself but to those vaguely anonymous and bleakly industrialised landscapes that surround it; again, Spooks and Minder territory, the suburban sprawl of charmless English sleaze, council estates and semi-wasted lands. His narrative flowers particularly well in these locales and they are the backdrop for some good set pieces.
I’ll safely put money on McAuley not having been to northern Iraq recently, but the scenes there that fill the second half of the book do not quite have as equally well-researched and ‘embedded’ a feel as he achieved throughout White Devils. But Mind’s Eye never quite takes you to the absolute source of its particular mystery, instead we’re treated to a fun assortment of bravado, derring-do and other necessarily close calls, leaving open-ended the earliest origins of the glyphs, this knowledge perhaps understandably left undiscovered and lost to the depths of prehistory but leaving a gap that one might feel needs filling to properly round out Mind’s Eye completely. Nevertheless it has to be said that whereas White Devils turned everyone’s heads and had McAuley favourably mentioned in the same breathe as Michael Crichton, on the further strength of Mind’s Eye that superior comparison is beginning to look rather justified.