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Neuropath by Scott Bakker
01/07/2008 . Source: Geoff Willmetts 
pub: Orion. 331 page enlarged paperback. Price: £ 9.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-7528-9151-4. 306 page hardback. Price: £18.99 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-7528-9150-7. Buy Neuropath in the USA - or Buy Neuropath in the UK  check out website: www.orionbooks.co.uk
Books can often sound better in the write-ups than in your hand. This is part of the reason reviewing takes place to see how well they match up.
Scott Bakker's novel has a nifty title, 'Neuropath', which unfortunately isn't backed up by the material between the covers. Well, certainly not up to the standards we expect from Science Fiction material. I think Orion sent me this book to see if it crossed the general fiction genre to our own.
The premise is interesting. Neil Cassidy is a neurosurgeon who has been working for the US government with invasive surgical techniques amongst other things. Essentially, he wires people's heads to get different responses. We'll forget the actual legal violations he's committing here cos he then uses this technique on Nora, his pal and psychologist Thomas Bible's ex-wife, and incapacitates her before fleeing. The FBI is on the case and need Bible to help track him down. What follows is a few convoluted plot twists on itself as to who are good and bad guys.
If you're expecting a novel to be somewhere between Michael Crichton and Thomas Harris then this isn't for you. If anything, this is practically page-to-page dialogue, mostly seen from Bible's perspective. I'm sure Bakker chose the Bible moniker solely so Cassidy could call him 'Goodbook'. It also means that when anything significant happens, it gets so washed with chat that the implications don't sink in.
This isn't helped by the lack of insight thoughts of what is going through these characters' heads. I almost get the impression that Bakker was asked to do something close to our genre but with a more general audience in mind and after reading a few books on neurosurgery knocked it out. If anything, its irksome to think that this idea could have been written so much better and with a lot more depth.
Whether or not this will please a general audience or this kind of material is expected from his fan base I don't know. Certainly the detective elements needed to be done better and more odd behaviour amongst those who've been wired to give insight or even have a better idea as to what was going on. Springing them on the characters without the insight that something is wrong just doesn't make it particularly fair to the reader. Let's hope the general fiction market prefers it.
GF Willmetts
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