I first read George Orwell's 1984 at what is normally considered to be a tender age. It definitely disturbed me. (I imagine you'd call for the men with straitjackets if I said it didn't?) I have since read other novels which include scenes of "legal" torture carried out by the servants of a totalitarian state, but I don't recall seeing another one which disturbed me nearly as much as Orwell's portrayal until I stumbled across this in a used book store. One original feature is that instead of concentrating on the viewpoint of a hero who is being tortured by the soulless villains who serve the state, we concentrate on the viewpoint of a young man who is being taught the tricks of the trade so that he can go out there and torture the prisoners whenever required!
Andrej Koscuisko would seem to have it all. He's the eldest son of the Prince of a huge corporation in a feudal and patriarchal culture, meaning that Andrej is of course the heir apparent. Freshly graduated with "highest honors in surgery" from the most prestigious medical school in the entire Jurisdiction (the interstellar civilization that runs everything, although the details of its power structure are not made entirely clear in this story). He had thought to spend ten years or so as a medical officer in the Fleet (military service was an old family tradition for the heirs), but therein lies the rub: Andrej hadn't realized what sort of service his father wanted him to volunteer for after he graduated from med school. In the Jurisdiction Fleet, the Chief Medical Officer of a "cruiserkiller-class warship" is always a licensed physician who has also been trained in how to torture prisoners to make them divulge their secrets. Other medical officers in other assignments only do what you would normally expect, and Andrej never had any interest in torturing people.
So why does he end up going to torture school if his preference is to heal people? You might call it "religious reasons." I said he came from a planet with a patriarchal culture, but it takes a little while for us to realize just how patriarchal it really is. Apparently, the laws and religious traditions of the Dolgorukij Combine (his home system) plainly state that all sons are legal minors until such time as their fathers either die or officially Retire, regardless of age, and are bound to obey any legitimate order the father gives them while he's still exercising authority. If he orders you to attend torture school, you're a vile sinner if you refuse. Andrej tried and tried to talk him out of it (we are told, though the novel only begins with his arrival at the school) but failed miserably.
I can see that the author, Susan R. Matthews, had to do it that way in order to achieve what would appear at first glance to be a contradiction in terms: a sympathetic protagonist who is conscientiously applying himself to six months of training and lab work in the torture school of what is apparently a totalitarian superpower that has a rather scornful attitude toward some of the civil rights that I always took for granted, such as the right to keep your mouth shut if you're accused of a crime. On the one hand, he's training for the sort of thing that is normally associated with historical and fictional villains. On the other hand, we saw a lot of his thoughts (although the novel is not exclusively written from his perspective) and we rather like what we see . . . usually. He has empathy, he has wit, he has imagination, he prefers to heal the sick instead of hurting the healthy, and he's even good to his slave.
Slave? Excuse me, I probably shouldn't call it that. The Jurisdiction probably has a law against slavery, although I don't recall anyone specifically saying so. What they do have is the "bond-involuntary," which is a sort of convict labor setup. If a healthy young adult is convicted of a severe crime (we aren't given a detailed list of which ones qualify) that merits severe punishment, he may be offered the choice of having a governor installed in his body which will keep an eye on his nervous system. The lovely device is so sensitive that it can prevent the bond-involuntary from doing or saying anything that is taboo. Such as physically attacking a citizen, or insulting him verbally, or refusing to obey a clear and direct order from someone who has been placed in authority over the bond-involuntary. If the bond-involuntary starts to break any of the rules, the governor quickly figures it out and reminds him of his error by manipulating his nervous system to cause considerable pain. We are told this, but I don't believe we ever saw it happening to anyone: the bond-involuntaries learn quickly what the limits are and condition themselves to stay clear of them. You can see why I translate "bond-involuntary" as "slave." The Jurisdiction only accepts volunteers for this program, we are told, but if they accept, they must give 30 years of service and then they get to retire: the governor is removed, and they are given a lump sun equivalent to the amount of money they would have earned if they had spent those 30 years as free men earning salaries at the standard pay rates, permitting a comfortable retirement. Of course, if they die during the 30 years, the Jurisdiction has saved a lot of money by only providing them with room and board up to that time, and we gather that this happens fairly often, since bond-involuntaries are often assigned as low-level security personnel (the governor allows them to engage in combat against someone who is clearly committing a nasty felony himself).
Each Student at Fleet Orientation Station Medical, to give it the official name for once, is assigned a personal bond-involuntary to be what I think of as his valet and bodyguard. Helps him dress, serves meals in his quarters, works with him in exercise sessions (including hand-to-hand combat lessons, proving once again just how sensitive that governor is to allow such things as long as you aren't really trying to maim the other guy), and attends to any other miscellaneous matters that arise. Andrej's valet is Joslire Curran, a fascinating man who clearly has a mysterious past. We are only given hints, but it seems to involve a complicated code of honor as a trained warrior, before whatever happened to get him convicted in a Jurisdiction court and offers the choice of a bond or some other punishment. One of the reasons the Student is given the bond-involuntary is to prepare him for supervising a team of four who will be his personal bodyguards after he goes out on field duty. Professional torturers are extremely unpopular with the rebels, for some odd reason. (Yes, there are rebels, but we don't actually hear much about what their agenda is. They may not be much better than the current ruling clique.)
As a matter of fact, the torturers-in-training aren't even popular with themselves. At one point it is mentioned that Andrej's Tutor (each Tutor trains just two Students at a time in each six-month term) currently holds the record: in the previous four terms, he has had an incredible zero suicides among his last eight students! No other Tutor on the Station can boast the same success rate.
Having filled in enough background to let you have a good idea of the setting for this story, I'll outline some of the plot and explain what makes this novel so disturbing.
Andrej needs to proceed through nine levels of Inquiry (they always say Inquiry, never Torture). All the way up to hopelessly maiming the prisoner and then putting him out of his misery for good, although not every case will go that far. The most shocking thing is that as he starts torturing helpless prisoners, he begins to discover something he never wanted to know about himself: it actually excites him! Once he really gets into it, something changes and he starts to enjoy the feeling of power and think of creative ways to hurt the prisoner until he starts blabbing. (After he finishes with an interrogation session, he seems to revert back to his normal conscientious self, feeling rather sick.) This is a science fiction novel, but that term takes in a lot of ground. This one definitely concentrates on issues of human psychology, with the advanced technology merely a backdrop to the character development. Most of the torture techniques we see involve such old reliable tools of the trade as knives and whips, despite the availability of a wide selection of drugs - if anyone had asked me, I would have guessed that the development of "truth serums" (admittedly a somewhat inaccurate name) in centuries to come would pretty much make the old-fashioned torture methods obsolete. Not in this particular future, though. Andrej has a real flair for breaking down the resistance of his prisoners, we discover, as well as a keen mind that can seize on any tiny verbal slip as a basis for a fresh line of questioning.
Matthews is clearly a gifted writer. Her style flows smoothly and makes me feel as if it's really happening, despite the unpleasant subject matter. Her characterizations are excellent; I can tell one member of the cast from another instead of feeling as if only the names are changing. I should mention that the actual torture scenes only comprise a small portion of the book if you tally up the pages; she is not simply describing an endless series of ugly procedures in excruciating detail to satiate an audience's presumed desire for such material. The focus is on how these things affect Andrej, and how other people view him when he first arrives and how their perceptions of him shift over time. She also does an excellent job of showing all the euphemisms and cynical attitudes and other mental tricks which the faculty and support staff must use to keep themselves from being overwhelmed by guilt at what is going on. I might mention that of the six months of training, the first three are devoted exclusively to having two Students sit in a classroom listening to the Tutor lecture on the proper theory and practice of torture (I mean Inquiry), with the first week in particular being exclusively devoted to explaining to them, one logical step after another, an intricate rationalization of all the reasons why it is such a great idea to use these techniques to maintain law and order. If the Jurisdiction leaders really believed this was consistent with what the Students' consciences were telling them, it would scarcely be necessary to harp on that single point for so long before moving on to anything else, would it?
Obviously we are dealing with such cheery themes as the discovery of latent sadism in oneself, and that of obedience to strong authority even when the orders received are filthy. Unfortunately, these themes are not pleasantly resolved by the end of the book. I admit the plot contains some almost-happy moments here and there. Andrej manages to do some rather clever things in efforts to make the lives of a few of the torture victims (not ones who had to be executed at the end) a little better. He puts his surgical skills to good use now and then. He manages to make a good impression, overall, on his slave - I mean his bond-involuntary. But at the end he is on his way to his assignment as Chief Medical Officer on a warship and we know he'll be doing a lot of torture in between prescribing pills and things for the military personnel. For some odd reason, the Jurisdiction seems to get an awful lot of subversive activity in one place or another (I can't imagine why). This novel does not happily resolve Andrej's problems with his role, it just shows him learning to live with them for the time being.
But then, it's only the first of a series. I know there are at least two more because I've picked up copies of the second and third at a used book store, but I haven't rushed to read them yet. I rather hope that some sort of happy ending is in store, or else I'm likely to end up feeling I've wasted my money, even at half price. (I also hoped that the narrator's incessant suffering in Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy would be justified by giving him a really happy ending in the final pages of the third book, but it wasn't. That was when I decided not to spend any more money on Hobb's subsequent books, although someday I may exert myself to check out her Liveship Traders trilogy from the public library now that all three volumes of it have been published.)
One thing I occasionally ask myself is: How did Matthews do the research for this book? Reading firsthand accounts by people who have survived being on the receiving end of unpleasant interrogations at the hands of the Gestapo, the KGB, or other organizations of a similar caliber? I'm not sure I really want to know the details.
Recommended:
