Halfhead (Book Review)
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011
Set in a future Glasgow eleven years after VR (Virtual Reality) riots led to the deaths of millions, Halfhead by Stuart MacBride offers an intense science fiction thriller experience with the hallmark detail of a master story-teller.
In this future Glasgow dangerous criminals are halfheaded… their jaw is removed, a feeding tube is attached and they receive a complete lobotomy. Their role in society after that point will be to perform menial cleaning tasks and to serve as an example to the public that criminal behaviour won’t be tolerated.
Enter Dr Fiona Westfield, psychopathic murderess and patron to an experiment in psychosis development. Her halfheading didn’t work as expected. She discovers her old identity and gets about her business of dismembering and torturing victims. But the objective is escape and revenge. That would be revenge on Assistant Network Director William Hunter who exposed her crimes… and revenge on the government conspiracy who stole her experiments.
I really enjoy books that do more than create a shallow future society that produces perfect outcomes. Corruption will always exist… society will not always be just… and in a sense Halfhead raises issues around the morality of sentencing criminals without appeal to frontal lobotomy and socially-condoned slavery. MacBride’s world projects the widened gap between the rich on one side of Glasgow and the poor on the other. And it pulls people with no hope into a world where VR is the only escape from the hopelessness of reality.
This is a fast paced thriller that does it’s best not to hide the reality of violence – from society, from criminals and from the institutions that manage to hold it together. This is no Starsky and Hutch world where the good guys are necessarily squeaky clean. This is Glasgow right down to the perpetual rain and urban violence.
