Majority rule

>> Andrew Pyper’s The Trade Mission reads like a bestseller mission

by JULIET WATERS

The Trade Mission begins during the peak of dot-com fever. It would have to for anyone to make a massive fortune off an idea like Hypothesys.

Designed by whiz-kid partners and best friends, Marcus Wallace and Jonathan Bates, Hypothesys is a Web site that makes ethical decisions for you based on the latest advances in polling. They can be life-changing decisions, like whether to leave your husband and kids, or niggling decisions, like whether to lie to a friend.

“Months” of research and high-tech “collaborative filtering” have gone into creating an Everyman consciousness that will ask you a few personal questions and then tell you what most people would do in your place. It would be sort of like having your own pollster, allowing people to conduct their lives like American presidents, albeit a very permissive pollster—one that would probably tell you to go ahead and get that blow job, or bomb that dictator. And one you might eventually fire, given that moral decisions are often very predictable, but moral consequences are often not.

That people would want to live this way is believable. That the Pentagon would show interest, even more so. That Forbes magazine would estimate initial public shares could generate capital “on a scale equal to the GDP of smaller industrialized nations” is a stretch. But if you can get past this improbability, and past the first 90 pages of narration by a vinegary 38-year-old translator, who must incessantly tell us about the charm of golden-boy narcissist Wallace—nothing that ever comes out of his mouth ever sounds like charm—then The Trade Mission is not a bad thriller.

Andrew Pyper’s follow-up to his immensely successful Lost Girls does, however, read like something also composed with the aid of pollsters.

Characters? For the Coupland demographic: young dot-com millionaires. For librarians and young profs, throw in much irrelevant homoeroticism and call the 38-year-old narrator Crossman. Keep gender indeterminate until page 32 when she buys a push-up bikini top to wear to dinner (Oprah!).

Setting? The Amazon rainforest. Will read like a hardcore episode of Survivor (age 20–34), where they can be tortured by Colombian mercenaries as a throwback to Deliverance (age 35–59), and be made into yet another re-imagining of Heart of Darkness (Apocalypse Now Redux DVD on reserve at U of T library). Finally they can meet up with psychotropic-cooking Yanomami, where Crossman can get her groove. (Oprah!)

All of these things combined make The Trade Mission a readable, provocative suspense story. And all of these combined things also make it soulless and manipulative. What one imagines will be a glowing success as a trade paperback is a dismal failure as a novel.

Most critically, The Trade Mission has no moral centre, just a preachy moral lesson. When Bates, understandably tired of trying to explain Hypothesys, tells a Brazilian hooker that he’s invented the perfect bomb, the group is kidnapped by the aforementioned Colombians. Their days stuck together, terrorized by professional killers (who do not consult polls), are about the only evidence of Pyper’s mega-talent. This is mostly because his characters are denied the chance to talk, finally giving Pyper the chance to write. Dialogue may not be Pyper’s strength. Anyone from another era reading his witless, cerebral sparring might peg this book as the moment in literature where irony was not quite dead, but very, very ill.

Lost Girls was brilliantly creepy. The Trade Mission is merely warped. And, again, his characters tend to be more cryptic than complex. But there’s still much in it to give one reason to hope for his literary career. (Think of Yann Martel’s post-modern mish-mash, Self, and compare it to his focused, imaginative Life of Pi.) Let’s just hope it’s not totally destroyed by his commercial career. :

The Trade Mission, by Andrew Pyper, Harper Flamingo, hc, 293pp, $34.95