What Lies Ahead is Already Here: The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks

Book Review
The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks
First Published in 2005
First Vintage Books Mass Market Edition, July 2006

The Traveler, the first installment in a three-part series, is a fiction about the fight for individual freedom and privacy set in today’s world. On one side are the Travelers, an obscure and dying sect whose members, because they can travel into other “realms”, can see things that ordinary people cannot—foremost that almost everyone is imprisoned by today’s society.

“’…many of the people you know think they’re being deliberate when they’re just on automatic. Like a bunch of robots, they drive their car down the freeway, go to work, get a paycheck in exchange for sweat and pain and humiliation, then drive back home to listen to fake laughter coming from the television set. They’re already dead. Or dying. But they don’t know it’”. –Hollis [a character in the book lecturing his students]

On the other side is a group called the Tabula by the Travelers but who amongst each other call themselves the Brethren. The Tabula believe in controlling a society through a combination of fear—mainly by way of government propaganda about terrorism and the news media’s reporting of it; surveillance—by monitoring and assessing all things electronic, whether credit card transactions or police surveillance cameras; and through a consumerism culture which creates the appearance of freedom by encouraging people to buy more.

“Five years ago, the Brethren’s psychological evaluation team had plugged into the computers of the shopping clubs run by American grocery stores. Whenever a person bought something and used their discount card, the purchases were entered into a general database. During the initial study, the Brethren’s psychologists attempted to match a person’s food and alcohol consumption with their political affiliation. Boone had seen some of the statistical correlations and they were fascinating. Women living in northern California who bought more than three kinds of mustard were usually political liberals. Men who bought expensive bottled beer in East Texas were usually conservative. With a home address and data from a minimum of two hundred grocery-store purchases, the psychological evaluation team could accurately predict a person’s attitude toward a mandatory citizen ID card.”

The Tabula and the Travelers have been fighting for centuries on equal footing, but the Tabula have appeared to have wiped out all Travelers in the last few years because of their advantage in using sophisticated technology. That is until Maya, one of the last Harlequins—a sect whose sole mission is to protect the Travelers—is assigned to find Gabriel and Michael, two possible Travelers who until recently have been hiding from the Vast Machine, a.k.a. today’s society. At stake is freedom itself: people’s knowledge of it and their ability to live in it.

The set of the book is global: while most of the action takes place in London, Los Angeles, and suburban New York, the author describes many other places in the world that are part of the Vast Machine, or today’s industrialized countries that are controlled by governments who are eroding our privacy rights in the name of security. Furthermore, John Twelve Hawk’s use of today’s technology in the plot such as the Internet, genetic engineering and quantum physics make the world he created seem very much like the world we live in.

Unfortunately the positives end there. The background of the story—the Travelers, along with their protectors the Harlequins and their teachers the Pathfinders, fighting against the Tabula is overly simplistic. Even if one gave the author the benefit of the doubt because it is a work of fiction, there are many other problems with this book. The narration and the plot is also quite simple and even childlike at times:

“By now Vicki was used to Harlequin manners. Maya found it difficult to say ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye.’ Perhaps her behavior was just rudeness or pride, but Vicki had decided there was another reason. Harlequins had accepted a powerful obligation: to defend Travelers with their lives. To acknowledge a friendship with anyone outside their world would be an additional burden. That’s why they preferred mercenaries who could be used and thrown away.”

There are also many instances of events being so unbelievable that they could only fit into a Hollywood blockbuster: for example, Hollis addressing the Jones’ church to try to get them to respect the Debt Not Paid faction.

While the depth of characters is shallow, it’s not a harbinger of failure for an action/mystery/sci-fi novel as evidenced by the success of Isaac Asimov for example. The problem is that half of the dialogue seems forced and fake, and the plot drags on for 480 pages. John Twelve Hawks came up with an interesting story, and it is true that much of today’s society is living like robots and our privacy is being eroded. Unfortunately the execution of that idea was not very good.