Conquest
Nina Allan (Riverrun)
Frank sees patterns in everything. He loves the music of Bach and is exceptionally good at his work as a coder, but he gets drawn into an elaborate conspiracy theory about a secret alien invasion, the “conquest” of the book’s title, supposedly predicted by an obscure 1950s science fiction tale by John C Sylvester. When Frank disappears, his girlfriend hires a private investigator to find him. This absorbing detective story is interspersed with concert reviews, true crime, film criticism, biographical sketches and a healthy chunk of Sylvester’s text detailing the aftermath of an interstellar war and the building of a gigantic tower from living stone. The novel touches on David Bowie and Upstream Color, The X-Files and Stephen Hawking. Are these elements merely disparate, or do they add up to something bigger? Does connecting them, as the story increasingly does, induct us into a dangerous conspiratorial mindset, or do the distinct elements cohere, as individual notes come together into the gestalt of music? Allan’s story is as mellowly complex as the Bach variations its main character adores, and her best novel yet.
