“I hardly read Irish writers any more,” said Julian Gough in 2010. “Novel after novel set in the 1970s, 60s, 50s... you wouldn’t know television had been invented.”
Although Gough’s mischievous dig at his peers predated a startling upsurge of exceptional new fiction from Ireland in recent years, it’s fair to say that the current scene remains hyper-literary in flavour, with Beckettian dramatisations of consciousness (see Eimear McBride or Claire-Louise Bennett) more common than all-action thrills and spills of the kind dished up in Gough’s apocalyptic new novel, Connect, a hi-tech chase narrative in low-slung prose.
Set in near-future Nevada, the story follows Colt, an autistic 16-year-old who spends so much time in virtual reality – escaping “crapworld” – that he’s waterproofed his headset so as to be able to shower in it. His mother, Naomi, a biologist, has figured out how to regrow human limbs by studying caterpillars - a breakthrough that, in view of its potential for use by the US military, means she’s on the watch list of her ex-husband, Ryan, a defence chief preparing to roll out a self-governing national security system resembling Skynet in The Terminator.
The ensuing mayhem unfolds in the deadly but jaunty style of a Hollywood action thriller. “Great, that’s all my day needed,” says Naomi, facing a gunman. Here’s Colt at a key moment:
I don’t want to die.
But I don’t want to kill.
I can’t kill him!
But, if I don’t...
I don’t want Mama to die.
This is the most difficult calculation he’s ever made... Decide.
Naomi relishes submissive sex, the legacy, we’re told, of childhood abuse at the hands of her father. After divorcing Ryan, she took pills to suppress her libido because “the ache of desire, with no outlet, was making her cry two or three nights a week”.
Her sudden decision to give them up licenses a lot of writing about sleepless nights (“Her nipples stir, and rise. She moves her legs apart, and moans”), which lends a slightly cake-and-eat-it air to the ostensibly feminist aspirations of Gough’s plot – which at one point sees Naomi sweet-talk a sleazeball colleague into thinking he’s in with a shot, only for her to fill him full of a lethal toxin.
As Naomi and Colt go on the run from Ryan’s fleet of self-starting drones, the novel comes to resemble a gonzo hybrid between The Matrix and Fifty Shades of Grey, written in its best moments with the pace and wit of Dave Eggers’s The Circle. Gough’s future America takes in Jetsons-style gadgetry (solar-powered robot hoovers, talking fridges) as well as end-times doomsaying: we’re told in passing of an incident in which high-school “biohackers” murder their classmates with “an airborne version of bubonic plague”. “We can print out one of those protein strips you like,” suggests Naomi when Colt is hungry.
In crucial moments, though, the novel loses vigour. It falls to Colt to use his expertise gained in the virtual world to tackle Ryan’s security system – a kind of deus ex machina (or deus ex machine code) resolution that Gough struggles to make vivid. And the love story by which Colt learns to set aside his insecurities for a real-world relationship with Sasha, a similarly troubled girl he encounters in-game, gives you the uneasy sense that Connect is using autism as a proxy for more universal rites of passage.
But while it strikes the odd wrong note, it hits so many others – as a story of family dysfunction plugged into larger questions about reality, evolution and the west’s self-definition as “the good guys” – that it’s easy to forgive.
• Connect by Julian Gough is published by Picador (£14.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
