Page 45 Review by Stephen
Nothing DC wrote in their solicitation prepared me for this terrifying ordeal of manipulation, indoctrination and outright programming. It's a book about power: the power of the word over the mind and even the body, especially when it's backed up with the promise of an afterlife of carnal pleasure or, I don't know, just not being tortured, really.
It's also a book about trust, and right to the very end I had no idea whether Ahmed - a former prisoner at Guantanamo Bay freed by his psychiatrist to help him infiltrate a jihadist organisation in Pakistan - was playing a long-game with Aaron in the cause of terrorism or genuinely trying to free him from his conditioning. I wasn't even sure whether Aaron had been successfully programmed to kill or whether he'd been driven insane by the whole idea of a verbal viral meme. Nor does Aaron. But the tension as they're wandering round New York City with their handlers, Aaron desperately trying to avoid the image trigger planted in his brain, is almost unbearable.
Oh yes, it's also a love story as it says on the cover. It really is. Once I realised that I remembered where else I'd seen James Romberger's art: back in the stunning SEVEN MILES A SECOND, also from Vertigo, some fifteen years ago. More recently he resembles a loose Guy Davis. His hidden Imam, The Old Man In The Mountains, is brilliantly unsettling - a ghostly, mummified corpse of a man - but we'll get to him later.
Dr. Aaron Goodman, psychiatrist, was working in a veterans' hospital on September 11th. The television was on when the first plane hit the Tower; by the time the second one hit he was desperately on the phone to his fiancée, Carol; because Carol was onboard.
Aaron's desire to do something directly himself to stop the bombs leads him to Guantanamo Bay and the torture rooms and dog kennel cages. They don't work. There's no information extracted, but some of the soldiers get a kick out of the simple act of humiliation. So Dr. Goodman tries a different approach with his first subject, Aaron.
"I'm going to drug Ahmed's food - a hormone cocktail, heavy on the oestrogen. - But I'm not doing it to humiliate him. It's like in therapy - I want him to feel he loves me. Then I can really fuck him over."
So it is that Aaron starts messing with Ahmed's mind, and Ahmed starts talking:
"They've heard from someone that I was Bin Laden's driver. I never admitted it, though, despite their... persuasions. But I tell you now: I was. And I'll tell you this, too. I wasn't important. But I do know something: I know that Bin Laden's the same as all the other murderous leaders that have betrayed us over the decades. Bin Laden's building an army, like Hussein's - but even more ruthless. Why? Because whoever controls the guns controls the oil. It doesn't matter what horrors a monster perpetrates to keep the masses in line. He can still cut a deal with the West for the oil. Or with the Chinese. Then he uses the oil money to buy factories and estates.
"But the Sheiks buy that property in Europe or North America. Not in the pristine land of Mohammed. The Sheiks and generals don't want industry in Arabia. They don't want a middle class with its own power base. They want everyone forever dependent on them and want they dole out from the oil tit."
It's then that Goodman's colleague Dr. Negreponte introduces the concept of the meme as a possible way of conditioning suicide bombers:
"The brain is a computer. The meme is a program made of words that runs it. The body is a meat puppet... The memes that really hook into the meat computer, they're embodied in just the right sounds and rhythms. Like jingles, songs, chants. Then, no other meme can dislodge them."
"So poetry is the most dangerous substance known to humanity - just the way I thought in high school."
"No, the most dangerous thing is a good poetic religious meme, one with the right sounds and meter. My studies show that repeated rhythmic chanting of that really hooks it into the neurons - and soon the pretty puppets talk all out of their heads… or bomb an abortion clinic."
I like what Cantor did there.
So it's back to Ahmed with the idea and he's positive that Negreponte is right, that the chanters back home talked of getting the rhythm just right and that Bin Laden himself once said they were really programmers. He even offers to take Aaron to the source, so he can discover for him what words and images switch bombers on so that they can take the knowledge back to Guantanamo and switch bombers off.
But is Ahmed doing this because it has been successfully manipulated, is he saying these things because he believes them to be true, or is he just telling Dr. Goodman what the man wants to hear to buy his own freedom and return to Bin Laden? Even in the safety of Guantanamo Aaron is highly suspicious of Ahmed's readiness to cooperate, but when they travel to Pakistan - and they do - and Aaron finds himself out of his comfort zone and out of his death, deep in the camp of the enemy, he starts going out of his mind with paranoia.
Those are the most powerful scenes, when the jihadists take Aaron in, when it's too late to go back and he's mostly separated from Ahmed. He's unsure whether he has successfully conned them of his sincerity to join their cause and become a suicide bomber himself, or whether they're going to execute him at any given moment. But The Old Man In The Mountains, ancient and seemingly ethereal, doesn't actually care if Goodman is sincere: once he's heard what he needs to hear and seen what he needed to see, he won't be taking any secrets home, but he will be a carrier, sent back to New York in the very same cause he set out to thwart.
The book's full of those sorts of ironies. In New York for example, you're constantly wondering whether Ahmed has played Aaron in exactly the same way Aaron was intending to play Ahmed - by making him love him. Do you ever find out? Oh yes, you most certainly do.
