The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 June 2009
by Neal Stephenson
The trouble with a novel called Zodiac is that your friends will think you're reading about the infamous Zodiac killings back in the 1970s. Once you get past that, though, you're in an entirely different story set largely in Boston in the late 1980s. The Zodiac of the title refers to those inflatable power boats you see in old Jacques Cousteau documentaries and footage of Greenpeace actions. Which is key, as our protagonist, Sangamon Taylor, is a chemist who works for an organization that's a cross between Greenpeace and Earth First!. He specializes in direct actions that get a lot of media attention, damaging and hopefully embarrassing large polluting corporations (are there any other kind?). We come across him as he cruises across Boston, past Boston University, and out toward MIT, where GEE has its offices. Already, we're familiar with the kind of extroverted attention-getter we're dealing with. The story establishes Taylor's credentials on a direct action plugging a toxic drain in New Jersey. When he returns to Boston, it is to deal with a puzzling and growing contamination of PCBs in Boston's legendary dirty harbor, the big toilet of New England. (The harbor and the Charles River were famous for how filthy they were. Neither were considered safe to swim in. Since the 1980s, the situation has greatly improved, but there are any number of similar disasters across the planet.) Taylor goes after Basco, a big polluting conglomerate run by the Pleshy family. The former owner is now running for president, so the exposure of PCB contamination can only be an embarrassment. Taylor takes it upon himself to prove the spread of the toxic mess. He starts by mapping contaminated lobsters with the help of some local fishermen. Soon, he is diving off of Spectacle island (once a dump, but now, after years of infill from the Big Dig, it is a park) and encountering mafiosos, heavy metal PCP addicts and genetic engineers. All of them are trying to divert his attention from one nefarious activity or another. The plot is a bit of a mess, and its lengthy action sequences, while well-drawn, slow things down considerably. The book is deeply centered on its narrator. Other characters, and there are many, are more two-dimensional. Which isn't to say we get to know a whole lot about Sangamon Taylor, either. He is a self-professed asshole, and there are a lot of people, even his friends, who think of him that way. But he is also out to bring down the polluters who use weak American laws to destroy the planet. In that, his actions are satisfying to read. The book is a bit of a mixture of Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang and any one of Carl Hiaasen's books, driven by intolerance of polluters and populated by crazy characters. One of Stephenson's early efforts. A bit of a mess, but a wise mess.
Also by Stephenson: [The Diamond Age]