(5/31/2008)
I am a Caleb Carr fan. His turn-of-the-century New York thrillers "The Alienist" and "Dark Angel" are marvelously inventive, fast-paced and suspenseful, and populated with fascinating fictional characters interacting with real historic figures in intriguing ways. But "Killing Time" has little of the magic that makes his other novels so enormously entertaining.
Directly derivative of Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," "Killing Time" has its own messianic Captain Nemo in Malcom Tressalian, the crippled son of the "inventor" of the information age who pilots a huge aircraft (called, a la Verne, a "vessel," complete with wood paneled rooms), through a dystopian world of the near future..
The plot is fantastically implausible, as Tressalian and his crew attempt to show the world that it is being deceived by the "money interests" by perpetrating elaborate internet hoaxes that have horrendous unintended consequences. The mission is so vague in its methodology as to be all but incomprehensible, and the awful outcomes seem to baffle even the resident genius, who at last concludes that people are just too dumb to recognize a good hoax when they see one.
As with Verne, a member of the the crew, psychiatrist Gideon Wolfe, serves as narrator, speaking in 2023 in that stilted Victorian style of 1898, and joining the others in wreaking havoc around the world in the name of saving it from itself.
The title, "Killing Time," refers to an attempt by Tressalian to go back in time to change everything. The ambiguous ending -- some things are better, but maybe some things are worse -- leaves us as puzzled as we were at the beginning.
Caleb Carr is wonderfully talented, but his attempt at social engineering through hoaxes and time travel makes "Killing Time" pretty much a waste of time. Where was Snopes.com in all of this?
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