Review: Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

Last night, I finished reading Tim Maughan’s debut novel, Infinite Detail. Told non-linearly, the story jumps back and forth between “before” and “after” a catastrophic global shutdown of the internet that shatters global supply lines for goods and medical supplies, wipes out nearly all business and industry, and generally reduces society to Third World levels. Told from the perspectives of a handful of characters, all connected in some way to the countercultural refuge of Stokes Croft in Bristol. It’s a chilling and powerful exploration about the extent to which hyperconnected information capitalism has infiltrated our lives and made us dependent on it, and what might happen if we were suddenly and collectively unplugged.

The story hit home for me particularly powerfully, not only because of the way it documents, with all the mundane inevitability of the everyday, technology’s fearsome excesses and the establishment’s instinctive adaptation to the post-apocalyptic new normal. It was also the defiantly local way it weaves the story into the geography of the Bristol area where I grew up – place names like Hanham, Lawrence Hill, Stokes Croft, St. Paul’s, Keynsham, Kingswood, Clifton, Brislington, Barton Hill, the Bear Pit – names that will be meaningless and arcane to most readers, but Maughan gives each of them a shout-out, insisting on the regional and local specifics rather than blurring them in a misguided and vague pursuit of the universal. The casual way a character addresses a near stranger as “my love” at one point speaks movingly to the intimacy and affection that – despite the violence, frustration and aggression that so often accompanies urban life – is still on some fundamental level embedded in the Bristolian dialect, and throughout Infinite Detail, the sense of warmth and solidarity embodied by that local linguistic quirk shows up again and again. In a future where nearly all communication by necessity happens face-to-face and on a local scale, there’s no simple conflict against easily-identifiable-yet-anonymous baddies – everyone is a human, responding to believable human impulses, affected by the same sense of sadness and loss, and dealing with it in the best way they can. Where conflicts arise, they are more often than not defused with compassion.

In contrast to the affection the novel shows for the infinite differences of local life, it reserves a colder gaze for the creeping homogeneity of global capitaslism. The devastating effects of one-size-fits-all smart city solutions are shown in microcosm through a quietly affecting section on people who make a living colelcting cans for recycling in New York. The vast container ships that ply the high seas, reinforcing global inequality as they shuttle wealth from poorest to wealthiest nations are visited post-collapse the as rotting monuments to an inscrutible age now past. Maughan’s descriptions of late information capitalism in its pomp tend towards a dry, pulled-from-the-headlines journalistic tone, and sometimes fully adopt the voices of the medium itself, whether it be the vaguely patronising tone of a faintly jocular BBC news item or the pompous, affected, revolutionary mannerisms of hacktivist groups like Anonymous. The adoption of these familiar voices drains the scenes of emotion but the contrast between the rising panic of a world racing towards destruction and the mundane voice of its narration heightens the reality and immediacy of what they describe.

There is no straightforward, binary, local-good, global-bad moral logic to Infinite Detail though. Maughan isn’t afraid to explore the complexities of the hyperconnected world, showing the way technology can bring people closer together and even act as a conduit for blossoming love, at the same time as how its algorithms so often entrench xenophobia and discrimination. Nor is a disconnected world a paradise: rather it’s a place filled with loss, from all the art that existed online, never to be retrieved, to the old couple who must wait ten years to finally learn of the death of their son.  His depictions of the playful possibilities of augmented reality glasses, and their potential for eerie-yet-affecting interactions with memory, at times recalls the combination of melancholy and sheer unbridled delight of 2007 anime series Dennou Coil (a show that I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest was a big influence on Maughan). In the end, Infinite Detail’s issue is more with who controls the technology and the ends to which it is turned than the existence of the networks and devices themselves.

But where the novel most obviously sparkles with energy, joy and hope is when Maughan talks about music. Throughout Infinite Detail, the pages vibrate with the sounds of jungle, drum’n’bass, dub, techno and grime, with loving descriptions of the assembly of soundsystems for outdoor parties, the sheer physical power of a bass drop, the tension and fear that accompanies every interaction between a cassette tape and its player.

In a lot of ways, music is the nexus of the whole book. A live performance (two live performances, really) is the event on which the “before” and “after” sides of the story hinge, and the thundering sounds of scrambling beats and heavy tape echo soundtrack many of the story’s most significant events. More than that, music is the area where the often antagonistic worlds of technology and community find the most perfect synthesis – technology opening up opportunities for creativity, mischief, transformation and connection. It’s there in the ramshackle pirate radio broadcasting from the Barton Hill tower blocks, which is the only real network post-internet Bristol has; it’s there in the monolithic speakers of the carnival soundsystem; it’s there in the way a character records, chops up, reconfigures and reproduces field recordings and beats as he manipulates resurrected tech to create music of his own.

Ghosts haunt Infinite Detail, both literally and thematically, and it’s a book with a complex relationship with the past – a sense that to move forward, we have to go back to an earlier fork in the road and take a different path. There’s a recognition in the novel that the music it describes is really the music of the past – and the 1990s in particular. This was the last era in which music was comprehensively and widely distributed primarily on physical media, as well as the last era before everything was finally and fully networked, disconnected from its physical roots. It was also the era when the possibilities of computers in music really came of age. The explosion of creativity and innovation in music at this time, with Bristol a key location, seems to represent to Maughan the promise of a lost future, tinged with both nostalgia and hope.

Infinite Detail doesn’t offer easy answers to the deep and troubling issues it raises about the world. It shares with Alan Moore’s V For Vendetta (the comic, not the defanged movie adaptation) a vision of the world where the reader is faced by a choice between two troubling alternatives. In Moore’s comic, the choice was fascism or violent anarchy, while in Maughan’s novel, the choice is ever more suffocating surveillance, inequality and environmental disaster or a traumatic collapse into the conditions of a Third World dictatorship. Forced labour farms, bodies hanging from lampposts and a life expectancy of around your mid-forties sounds bad, but then set against the probable reversal of global warming, who’s to say it wouldn't be worth it in the long run?

It teases you with tragedy throughout, and it’s a book that could easily have taken a bleak route. However, Maughan seems aware of the need for hope in the face of what can often seem like late capitalism’s unstoppable dominance over every aspect of our lives, showing excitement as well as wariness at the possibilities of technology. At the same time, his depiction of the fragility of contemporary capital infrastructure contains regular reminders that the collapse of the present contains hope for the future.

Gmail has started working again by the time I finish writing this. It’s a momentary, and honestly quite pleasant, interruption to the smooth workings of this overconnected world. Each interruption like this carries with it a reminder of how helpless we are without this technology though, and it’s worth considering whether the most chilling question Infinite Detail poses isn’t, “What happens if someone finds a way to bring all this down?” so much as, “What happens if someone doesn’t?” Still, as the old French leftist saying has it, “The hour calls for optimism; we'll save pessimism for better times,” and the issues at stake in Infinite Detail are too serious to be defeatist about. If it can’t offer a solution, this excellent novel at least offers an exhortation to keep trying.