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Aug. 21, 2001, 2:02PM Caleb Carr falls short with new novel set in futureBy MICHAEL J. BANDLER
KILLING TIME.
NOVELIST Caleb Carr naturally could not have foreseen the post-election complexities that would unfold as Killing Time, his latest piece of fiction -- which looks a quarter-century or so into the future -- touched down in the nation's bookstores. It's tough to compete with reality. Yet here's his take on what's in store for us in the next couple of decades: hurricanes in 2005 that devastate the Hamptons; a financial crash in 2007, a year after a staphylococcus epidemic claims 40 million lives worldwide; the assassination of a (female) American president in 2018; a national E. coli outbreak in 2021; and in the new-products category, massive multilevel air buses, DNA instant identification and below-carpet electronic sensors that guide robot vacuum cleaners in their housekeeping. And that's all before his story begins. Carr, who began his writing career with a passion for military history and biography, burst onto the best-seller lists in 1994 with The Alienist, a devilishly clever, intricately spun thriller that blended fact and fiction in the manner of E.L. Doctorow and others. Centered on the investigation of a serial murder in the dank lower-class underworld of 1890s New York City, it was as engrossing for its atmospherics and texture as for its tightly woven plot. He returned to that setting and era and brought back a number of his characters three years later in The Angel of Darkness (adding Clarence Darrow -- in his ascending years -- as a pivotal figure). As he dealt with crime and violence on a nearly forgotten urban landscape, he dappled both books with a measure of social commentary about life a century ago. In his latest novel, told almost totally in flashback, Carr has inflated the canvas and shifted his perspective. Rather than returning to the past, he's chosen to speculate about the future, as it is lived not in one relatively constrained setting but globally. You're reminded of those Internet map sites that home in on one community, then zoom out for a wider image. That's what Carr does, cutting a wide swath across the Earth, transporting the reader to several continents. Blending elements of Huxley, Orwell and Sir Thomas More, the author constructs his tale around what appears to be his principal current preoccupation, the sobering impact of "this fatuous, trivial, information-plagued society," as one character puts it, and the possibility of "a qualitative shift in the nature of society itself." In fact, the question he grapples with until the very end (through his protagonist, a criminal psychologist) is what truly constitutes an "information age." Carr creates a team of utopian activists -- scientists, doctors, technicians and an ex-general -- and places them in a bubble, a massive aerosub of sorts that can fly to unparalleled heights and penetrate seas and oceans to unchartered depths, rumbling ominously as it approaches. Equipped with the most futuristic gear imaginable (able, for example, to blend its silhouette into the landscape by engaging a holographic projector), it is a minuscule new world -- brave to an extent, reckless in many ways -- whose pilots are intent on affecting the way people and governments think by changing historical facts on the ground and becoming involved in developing events. To a large extent, Killing Time is rooted in one collective piece of baggage, one basic human emotion: vengeance. That drives most of the denizens of the vessel, precipitates certain actions by governments or other forces and fuels the bloody trek of a pivotal terrorist. Yet the action too often becomes diffuse -- tossed in, seemingly, to ignite the story between philosophical colloquies that seek to establish the characters' primal motivation. And because Carr's story moves so frenetically from locale to locale (New York, Afghanistan, Scotland, Italy, Russia, central Africa), readers will miss the sense of place that was so telling and so vital to his last two books and is only hinted at here. Perhaps, having written this cautionary tale, the author will see fit to journey back from the future, to find a quieter, less "information-plagued," albeit informed, time and place.
Michael J. Bandler, of Silver Spring, Md., writes frequently on literature and the performing arts.
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