Review: Glow - Ned Beauman

A corrupt multinational corporation is engaged in a shady battle over mineral rights in the developing world; in London, Burmese people are being kidnapped in broad daylight. Rumours of a new wonder drug about to hit the capital’s rave scene somehow connect these two developments. One man is trying to get to the truth, but the path is complicated by dodgy PR men, Serbian gangsters and a love interest who may be using him as a patsy to get what she needs. Along the way, there are a series of double crosses and hooded rides in the back of transit vans. Ned Beauman’s third novel has a lot in common with the conspiracy thriller genre.

Beyond this, there’s a pervasive feeling of paranoia and alienation. Raf, the protagonist, has a rare syndrome which means his body clock doesn’t synchronise with 24 hour patterns, unmooring him from the natural rhythms of life. He does a bit of freelance web design, and has some loose connections with South London’s rave culture, doing odd jobs for pirate radio station Myth FM and attending a lot of illegal parties in launderettes. At one of these events, he first hears about a new designer drug, known as Glow, and meets Cherish, a beautiful Burmese woman with an American accent. Their relationship deepens when Raf’s friend Theo disappears, apparently abducted by men in a silent white van. Raf’s investigation suggests that the vans are also linked to the disappearance of Burmese men and women in London, and he works with Cherish to find out where the abductees are being taken.

If Raf has become unstuck in time, other characters have become uprooted by globalisation. Beauman describes the conflict between the mining company, Lacebark, and their Burmese opposition as ‘a war between two stateless peoples that happens to be taking place inside a state’. The people he comes into contact with have also altered their sleeping patterns to fit the demands of modern capitalism, from the Iranian twin brothers who run their shop as a twenty four hour operation to the three Japanese fashion students who share his friend Isaac’s spare room, sleeping in shifts to make the best use of the space. Even Rose, a bull terrier, is forced to make her home on the top of a tower block, in order to protect Myth FM's transmittors. The only organisms which adapt successfully, like ‘glo’, the organic precursor of the new drug, are able to thrive thanks to artificial stimuli, the 24 hour light pollution of the city accelerating its reproductive cycle.

The idea of individuals and companies transcending state boundaries is interesting. In his blog, Beauman talks about being influenced by Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which argued that multinational corporations, backed by neo-liberal politicians, had begun to use massive social upheavals, such as those which follow environmental disasters, as a launching pad for the takeover of governmental infrastructure by private interests. In line with neo-liberal doctrine, these businesses had taken on the role of the state, sometimes by force, seizing control of infrastructure and essential services. The audacious parallels Klein drew between the bodies of individual torture victims and states which had been the subject of overwhelming 'shock and awe' attacks are rather novelistic in style, and would make fertile ground for fiction, but Glow doesn't quite reach such heights.

Beauman has clearly learned a lot from Klein about how abductees are softened up for interrogation, and the role of private defence contractors in conflict zones, but he doesn't create a sense of real peril for the main characters. Maybe he wants to avoid the cliches of spy thrillers (the scene where Bond or Bourne is held hostage and tortured by the supervillain), but it does mean the book lacks the visceral edge of Klein's reportage. Whereas Klein's text took the reader deep into secret prisons and CIA black spots, Raf wanders around abandoned warehouses, guessing at what might have happened, a distancing technique which allows the reader to believe that the action may all be going on in his head.

With his eye for the quirky, Beauman is interested in the strange, experimental goings-on at the fringes of the war on terror, rather than the dark heart of the conflict. For example, his depiction of a replica London street complete with extras, built as a training ground for Lacebark's mercenaries, brings to mind the story of Carl Weathers (the actor who played Apollo Creed in the Rocky films). At the height of the war in Iraq, the US Army created a series of fake Iraqi villages in the Mojave desert, populated by Iraqi ex-pats who had been living in San Diego (some playing the role of insurgents), for the purpose of training new recruits. Weathers trained the 'insurgents' in the art of guerrilla warfare, to make the simulations as lifelike as possible. So realistic was the experience that many of the troops apparently suffered from PTSD before they had even left the country.

Beauman's decision to move the narrative to London should make the action feel more immediate, but the way he foregrounds the love interest between Raf and Cherish, and the temptation to include some South London hipster piss-takes, neutralises this. There is a benefit to Beauman's eye for comedy though. While many thrillers follow the course of tightly planned conspiracies, Beauman is aware of the possibility of panic, chance and cock-ups intervening in the plot. The Burmese dissidents and corporate suits both retain an ambiguity, a sense of tension between ruthlessness and empathy, which indicates that they may not be as different as they seem. Other characters, like Raf and Fourpetal, an amusingly ultra-corrupt PR man, stumble into the way of the conflict, acting as distractions for both sides. At times, you could be tempted to view the entire struggle as a symptom of their own psychic damage.

The sense throughout Glow is of a group of people trying to adapt to a new environment, which might not be optimised to meet the needs of humans. The characters display paranoid mindsets, engaging in plots and double crosses, or burying themselves in arcane research in the dark recesses of the internet. Beauman has recently written about the phenomenon of gang stalking, or the feeling that one is being watched in some way, or followed. Chatrooms and forums have allowed self-identified victims of this harassment to compare the techniques of gang stalking, from mind control to mechanical pigeons. In a queasily voyeuristic way, Beauman argues that this paranoia has a literary tinge, and would be a means to explore more general feelings of alienation and dislocation that are the result of modern city living. Glow is, in part, an attempt to do this.

Beauman is regularly compared to Will Self, and whilst Glow is lighter, more commercial and more obviously comic than any of Self’s output, there are similarities. Both share an interest in paranoia and schizophrenia, and neither is afraid to send the reader off in search of a dictionary. The arcane vocabulary of Glow is mainly chemical, with references to suprachiasmatic nucleuses, athylbuphedrone, chromatography and anthocyanin extract all popping up early on, but some descriptions are also positively Selfian, not least his references to the ‘soft crepitation of tyres’ and the ‘cloacal’ taste of a pint of beer. There’s also a nod to William Burroughs and the 23 enigma, with Myth FM being based in Flat 23 of a tower block.

Although Glow is an entertaining and amusing read, there isn’t the same sense of progression from his previous novel that there was between Boxer, Beetle and The Teleportation Accident. This might be explained by chronology (apparently it was written before The Teleportation Accident was published, so maybe doesn't take into account the raised expectations which follow a Booker nomination), but it is slightly frustrating for the reader. For someone who is potentially one of the most imaginative and audacious young novelists around, this feels a bit safe, a solid 7 out of 10 rather than a shot at real glory. There’s a lot to like in Glow, and there are plenty of interesting ideas bubbling away under the surface, but it would have been a much more rewarding read if Beauman had delved deeper into them.