A Predictable and Not Paricularly Thrilling Thriller
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Author: Robert Harris
Title: The Fear Index Genre: science fiction When Moore’s Law meets the Turing Test, you’ve got yourself a thriller: that’s what Robert Harris would have readers of The Fear Index believe. But perhaps I’m ahead of myself… Alex Hoffman used to be a science geek, now he’s a financial geek. The self-teaching algorithm he designed to help CERN sort petabytes of data looking for “the God particle” has been repurposed to track financial markets. A trading algorithm uses a version of the volatility index VIX, sometimes called “the fear index,” to manage billions of dollars in Hoffman’s hedge fund. It is quite successful: once a penniless academic, Hoffman lives a quiet life in a sixty-million-dollar Swiss mansion with wife Gabrielle. Quiet until the night someone slips through the impregnable security of his house, apparently bent on killing him. The next forty-eight hours find Hoffman’s life, marriage, and company disintegrating in what seems a psychotic episode. Strange things continue to happen around Hoffman: orders he doesn’t remember giving, gifts he doesn’t remember buying, policies he doesn’t remember setting. Except Hoffman’s pretty sure he hasn’t forgotten, he’s not psychotic, and someone has set him up… or maybe it was something… Brit writer Robert Harris has concocted an alternative (albeit fictional) explanation for the May 6, 2010, plunge in financial markets. On that day the DJIA dropped almost 1000 points in minutes. Financial experts blame that roller-coaster ride on a clerical error; but what if the cause was something more sinister? Harris grabs that thought and runs with it, generating a classic loner against impossible odds thriller. As the tale progresses, Hoffman finds himself facing an adversary who’d already painted him into a corner before he even knew the game was afoot. The setup is so skillful that everyone surrounding Hoffman, partner and wife included, is convinced that he’s gone over the edge. Only the genius Hoffman seems to have figured out what’s going on; and no one believes him. Loner? Check. Impossible odds? Check. The thriller is in progress. Problem being that for a bunch of pretty smart people, everyone around Alex seems to be pretty easily fooled – and any reader who is also fooled and hasn’t figured out who’s pulling the strings by the halfway point of the novel should probably feel ashamed of himself. Harris has an interesting premise, though the plot’s underpinnings aren’t particularly original. He’s peopled his novel with reasonably well-drawn characters, though he pounded rather heavily on the stereotype button of his word processor. The action builds nicely as we approach the climax, though that climax is quite predictable – and so is the little twist at the end. The Fear Index might have been improved had Harris inserted more suspense and dragged the occasional red herring across the “villain’s” trail. He didn’t, however, giving us a by-the-numbers thriller that is about as suspenseful as a laundry list. Nice, mindless reading; though not particularly thrilling. |