Book Review: Novelty by Leon Dermot

Reviewed by Peter Hassebroek

Liberate humanity from the fate of determinism with this reality-shaking book.

Expect the unexpected might be a cliché, but it fits this deeply original novel nicely. This dystopia is in part a confessional autobiography and a thought-provoking manifesto about a billionaire and their device that injects randomness into the world.

Finn Balor (not the WWE performer) is a highly accomplished businessman who has an almost inexhaustible capacity to accumulate wealth and notoriety, with a conceit to match: “Not Elon rich, but I could give as good as I get in a pissing contest with the Murdochs if I were so inclined.”

This affluence does not extend to his private life, which favors escapist indulgences over human contact. Aside from his driver Darko, Finn’s primary companionship consists of The Sirens, a group of women, all exes. Their physical selves are elsewhere, but their essences remain in his mind, dispensing advice, generally through dreams. The phlegmatic manner with which Finn describes this sways one’s suspension of disbelief to sound credible. Yet the possibility he’s insane can never be ruled out, even by himself.

“. . . because the one thing my life feels like recently is highly personal. And that’s what my vices do. They don’t damp down the volume on the call with the lunatic inside my head. Instead, they hang up the phone.”

Then again, how could he not have some mental instability, considering his upbringing with his zealously religious mother? For starters, and to her dying day, she thought Finn was immaculately conceived, then subjected him to an exorcism and subsequent baptism. He concedes his childhood is the prime foundation of his dogmatic certainty that free will is a delusion. He also believes the deterministic nature of the human world will lead to its inevitable expiration.

To combat this, Finn applies his vast resources to produce a device, Oracle, and his business acumen to propagate it through a cultish organization, Q-Path. His aim is to inject quantum randomness or novelty to save humanity from the doom of determinism. Or humanely accelerate its demise if he’s wrong.

The speculative story involving the development of Oracle and its impact is intriguing, but at its heart, the book is a meaningful character study. Finn is a complex man with a breadth of knowledge that retains enough objective distance for intelligent personal introspection amid insightful observations on the human condition.

Finn doesn’t engender sympathy or even empathy; he is not someone to love. He varyingly seems madman, sad man, megalomaniac, and altruist who casually switches between arrogance and self-deprecation. But he is always compelling, erudite, and worth listening to. The inability to establish the reliability of Finn as narrator is absorbing in its own way. His story serves up a smorgasbord of psychological matter. And it all stems from a singular philosophical certainty that spawns a singular purpose:

“Observe your thoughts as they arise, and you will see there is no agency at play here, no ghost in the machine. So, free will? Alas, no. But randomness in nature? Yes, that’s a thing. Mainlining randomness was theoretically achievable. True unpredictability was the only means of introducing real novelty into our lives.”

In short time, Finn realizes he’s unleashed an unpredictable world-altering monster akin to Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, only traceable. It would have been interesting to read about these consequences in more detail though.

One can visualize the cogs turning in the protagonist’s head in this absorbing envisioning of a randomized burgeoning dystopia.

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