Book review: ‘Shimmer’

Shimmer

by Eric Barnes

Unbridled Books

288 pages

hardcover

White collar criminals have gotten rather a short shrift in recent literature. With the exception of Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis and William Gibson’s recent work, few serious novelists have bothered delving into the lives of those new economy billionaires who make the new global economy hum – and who seem more than willing to gleefully destroy said economy in the name of their own insatiable greed. It’s almost as if these technology billionaires inhabit the cultural space heretofore reserved for philosophers and artistic geniuses, as if they’re not quite human, their internal lives so alien from those of us normal folk that authors are intimidated by the prospect of trying to capture them in literature. Luckily for readers, Eric Barnes is completely fearless. His debut novel, Shimmer, is an insightful and incisive rendering of the kind of high-tech confidence man that it’s impossible not to recognize from the 24-hour news cycle.

Shimmer’s protagonist, Robbie Case, is the CEO and founder of Core Communications, a twenty billion dollar company built on a visionary new technology that allows the transfer of data at unparalleled speed. The only problem being that the technology doesn’t work. Instead, the product at the heart of Case’s impossible transfer speeds, the Blue Box, relies on a massive shadow network of servers to provide the promised performance, with the result that each Blue Box sold loses Core a huge amount of money. The entire corporation is a gargantuan Ponzi scheme, relying on quick sales and skyrocketing stock prices to survive.

Only three entities in the company are aware of the true nature of Core’s flagship product. There is Robbie Case, who lives in constant terror of discovery by his own people, particularly his director of security, Whitley. Then there is Case’s step-brother and cofounder, the deftly amoral head of sales, Trevor. Finally, there’s the software application that coordinates the shadow network, Shimmer, which consumes Case’s nights:

And so, late at night, I stared at Shimmer, Shimmer representing all the information in full motion, data transformed into images and color, curling shapes and ever-turning lines. Shimmer was omniscient, the infinitely powerful reflection of the secrets it tracked. And, of course, this was yet another reason I was the only person who had access to Shimmer. Because Shimmer simplified everything it controlled. With Shimmer, the shadow network could be displayed in the simplest of images, made clear to every manager in the company, to every analyst on the outside, and to Whitley and her SWAT team.

As the passage suggests, Barnes easily conveys an elaborate and convincing technological world without bogging down in details. In fact, as with the aforementioned Delillo and Gibson, the technology, though high concept, is not the main subject of Barnes’ interest, except in the ways it transforms the characters. In Core’s teeming subterranean shadow network, as well as in the superstructure of Shimmer that controls it, ever working to both hide and coordinate the movement of data, it’s easy to find parallels to Case’s own internal world. Especially as Case’s guilt deepens, and he becomes more and more alienated from his co-workers and even himself, going months without stepping outside of the building, and finding himself only able to experience human contact as delivered by high-priced call girls.

Shimmer manages to work on as many levels as its namesake. It is a painstakingly-plotted and fast-paced thriller, but it is also a remarkable character study, unflinchingly probing the psyche of its flawed but compelling protagonist. The choices that lead to Robbie Case’s fall never seem quite laudable, but they do seem understandable. And, well, human.