The Wave (2006)
I'm a big fan of Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries, but can't honestly say I've ever enjoyed any of his forays into other genres, nor his other mysteries. The Wave is science fiction, a kind of Day of the Triffids/Invasion of the Body Snatchers inflected with the usual Mosleyian racial themes. When Errol Porter, who's recently been laid off from his job and deserted by his wife, starts getting prank phone calls they seem to be coming from his dead father. Following clues from the caller he ends up at the cemetery where his father's supposed to be buried and meets a younger version of the old man. Though physically a man in his twenties, Errol's father has a somewhat childlike mind, despite memories of an entire adult life. Eventually it is explained that this doppelganger is just one iteration of a life form that is rising up from the Earth where it has been buried for eons. It's revivifying the dead in order to interact with the living in preparation for The Wave, which it claims will see it join with some kind of interstellar being who's headed our way.
In the meantime though, Homeland Security has cottoned on to the action and Errol and his "father" and the other iterations are soon on the run. Errol is captured and held by an obsessed military doctor who's developing the means to kill off lifeform in toto, lest it kill off humankind instead. Forced to choose sides, Errol casts his lot with the entity against his fellow humans.
Now, it seems to me that there's a decent novel to be had out of this setup, but perhaps it would require a rather more serious moralist than Mr. Mosley to write it, someone capable of sounding a note higher than "racism = bad." Consider that the Left's favorite philosopher, the vile Peter Singer, has developed a theory of "speciesism" in recent decades, which holds that our willingness to eat hamburger but not to have sex with cows reflects nothing but an unjustifiable bigotry on our part that the bovine is not our equal. Or ponder, as Francis Fukuyama has, the implications of genetic engineering and the dreams of the transhumanists, that we will bioengineer a superior species, such that it would no longer be accurate to say that "all Men are Created equal." In both of these cases, and in the instance of the creature in Mr. Mosley's book, we can develop an interesting question of whether our primary loyalty should lie with humankind or whether, upon deciding that Man is not the highest being in the Great Chain, ought one to collaborate with other species? If Hitler were right would a non-Aryan Darwinist be obligated to help exterminate himself for the good of the gene pool?
As that last suggests, I find these ideas quite repellent and the complete lack of introspection with which Erroll essentially decides to become such a collaborator struck me as bizarre. Even someone less offended by the whole notion will be hard pressed to find much admirable in the thing, certainly not enough to justify Errol's choice. Indeed, what Errol is most drawn to is the aspects that are most anti-human--the way in which the various expressions of the thing all still share an undifferentiated unity. They may lack individuality, personality, curiosity, morality, and all the rest, but they're never alone. in a strange way, what this really sets up for is a classic '50s movie, with the thing as an almost perfect representation of collectivism/communism. Of course, that would require Errol to join in the fight against it, an outcome that would make a great deal more sense both morally and dramatically. As is, the book only works intermittently, when Mr. Mosley gets carried away enough by his imagination to make us believe that at least he believes his creation is worth caring about.
(Reviewed:07-Jan-06)
Grade: (C)
