The Fear Index (2011) by Robert Harris
Good Reads meta-data is 323 pages, rated 3.55 by 16,526 litizens.
Genre: Thriller diller.
DNA: Switzerland.
Verdict: Gulp!
Tagline: The AI did it!
It all began when Rich Brain received a book fin the mail, a first edition of Chuck Darwin’s Origin of Species. Nice. It will add to his collection of first editions that he never looks at among the other luxury goods stuffed into his vast Geneva mansion. (Thereafter passages from Darwin are chapter epigrams. Neat.)
Trouble is, who would give churlish, reclusive Rich Brain anything? He rings up the seller at 2 am, because he is Rich Brain and time means nothing to this titan, to ask who bought the book. The groggy seller says, ‘You did.’ Huh! That threw Big Brain but Seller read out the details, including the bank account, which is later checked and found to be one of his many stashes, this one is not in a Cayman Islands tax shelter. The mystery begins!
(I have occasionally received a book delivered in the mail and forgotten both that I ordered it and why I wanted it. But I knew who to blame. The dog!)
Rich Brain is a mathematical genius, just ask him. Wait! Don’t he will simply sneer at you for asking about the obvious. While Brain disdains money, he disdains even more those without it. He seems to characterise those around him from the outside in. Think Jay Gatsby. A man wearing a cheap suit must be a cheap (= stupid) man, and so on, thus reasons this Croesus. Although it is true that he disdains just about everyone else, too. He is an equal opportunity despiser of one and all.
This genius has devised an Artificial Intelligence program, call it Vix, capable of learning to trade stocks and he has been minting money from it. Trades of a billion US dollars is all in a day’s work. Overnight he makes millions, each and every night. Oh hum.
Well the Darwin book is one thing but an intruder into his fortress home who seems to have walked in through the front door, politely leaving his shoes at the mat, despite the Maginot Line security, is quite another. The plot thickens. In what follows there is much to’ing and fro’ing in Geneva that I liked. I spent a day there once including a homage to Rousseau.
He is now caught between two men in cheap suits, a weary police officer and the intruder. Though his coincidental sightings of the later stretch credulity.
Is Rich Brain having a schizophrenic nervous breakdown? Is someone out to get him? Are both true, or neither? He goes off the rails, but was he pushed or did he jump? Then again, he was never quite on the rails to begin with. Meanwhile, what is Vix doing? Well quite a lot, and that is scary, too. I thought of the Forbin Project (1970). Reviewed elsewhere on the Blog.
Vix is determined to survive per Darwin.
Great ride; no finish. Why did Vix gaslight Brain (book) and then try to get him killed (intruder)? Was it an Oedipus complex? Will Brain be tried for murdering the German? Does Vix have yet a third location? Why did Gabby latch onto Brain in the first place, and second why did she stick with him? Will Inspector Weary make it to retirement?
P.S. I classed it as a ‘thriller’ above but it is not written in the frenetic, confused, jump-cut style which leaves it to the reader to fit the jigsaw puzzle of words together. A mercy that.