Helen Macdonald is best known for their award-winning memoir H Is for Hawk, which describes training a goshawk after the unexpected death of their father: a haunting, expressive account of grief, raptors and healing. Macdonald’s latest, co-authored with the US writer Sin Blaché, is a very different kind of book: a fast-paced techno-thriller, with a high body count, zippy dialogue and an intriguing central mystery. H Is for High-Octane Adventure, then.
We might call this book science fiction, although neither of the two fantastical conceits upon which the story is premised is exactly scientific. One is that the protagonist, Sunil Rao, possesses the ability to know whether any given statement is true or false. There are limitations to his power: “emotional states”, he tells us. “There’s a lot of vagueness with those. Can’t track them.” Still, it’s a pretty impressive superpower: “what I can do is judge the veracity of propositional statements about the world. Written, spoken, even implied.”
You might think this would be a boon to science, philosophy, even theology, but that’s not the use to which Rao is put. Instead, the military fly him out to Afghanistan to sit in on the interrogation of suspected terrorists. It’s not clear why: protestations of innocence don’t stop the torture, even when Rao informs the interrogators that the protestations are true. Traumatised by his experiences in the Middle East, Rao has left the army as the novel opens and is living a self-destructive, chaotic kind of life back in Britain. He is recruited by a buttoned-down military investigator, Lt-Col Adam Rubenstein, to investigate a series of strange deaths at a military base.
These deaths are the result of the second of the novel’s fantastical premises. Something, somehow is actualising the happiest memories of people, manifesting them as toys, pets, fairground rides and the like. In one case an entire 1950s-style American diner appears from nowhere in the middle of a field. This is the memory of Ed Gibbons, a military contractor working at the nearby base. But when Rao and Rubenstein take him to the site, it kills him; he dies, it seems, of sheer happiness.
These nostalgic actualisations are caused by “Prophet”, an aerosol being developed by a mysterious organisation to weaponise nostalgia: embodying people’s happy memories in order to kill them. Macdonald and Blaché handle the conceit with such gumption, and rattle through it at such speed, that it avoids collapsing into mere silliness. The novel is immense fun, a work of exceptional storytelling skill and stylistic panache.
Rao and Rubenstein travel the world investigating the case, getting into fights, tripping over corpses and getting closer to the people behind Prophet. The writing is high-spec, lively, vivid. The dialogue is sharp, often funny. Rao’s flamboyant, sarcastic, extrovert gayness stays, just, on the right side of outre caricature, and his developing relationship with Rubenstein is both believable and touching. Rubenstein is the one person in the world that Rao can’t “read”, so he can’t be sure whether he is telling the truth, which means he has to learn to trust him – a precondition for love. Two chalk-and-cheese personalities clashing on the way to true love is something of a romcom cliche. But in the thriller setting, framing the kiss-kiss with so much bang-bang means this relationship lands with greater freshness.
And though I started by suggesting that a queer X-Files-style thriller is a very different sort of book from H Is for Hawk, Prophet has quite a lot in common with the earlier work. Without letting the pace slacken, Macdonald and Blaché manage to fold in powerful reflections on loss and trauma. The balance of the lethal actualisation of happy memories with the sensitive, believable way the two main characters are shown processing their unhappy ones makes this novel a cut above the usual techno-thriller fare. H Is for Highly Recommended.
• Prophet by Helen Macdonald and Sin Blaché is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
