Systems in analysis?

The following, from Ken MacLeod's latest, made me laugh with recognition:

Reminded, Ferguson invoked the [Police National AI]. The overnight correction work had reset the system's suspicion parameters, but in the wrong direction. After requesting arrest warrants for every one who had been on Easter Road for the past week, the PNIA was once more in the process of being talked down.

MacLeod, K., (2008), The Night Sessions, Orbit: London, 82

Even if the balky technological entities I curate don't actually suffer from paranoia, my attempts to coax them back into production often feel more like a form of psychoanalysis than they do real computing.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union

For once, it seems, I'm ahead of the curve: I've already read Michael Chabon's Hugo award winning novel, The Yiddish Policeman's Union. It's an interesting combination of a murder mystery, a story of one man's rediscovery of himself, full of telling political parallels.

The book takes as its central conceit the idea that the 1948 war failed to result in the establishment of the State of Israel but rather in the establishment of a temporary homeland in and around Sitka, Alaska. But after sixty years, with the lease almost up and the province about to revert to US rule, the citizens of Sitka are on edge — either planning their escape routes or filling in paperwork which they hope will entitle them to stay on following reversion.

So when homicide Detective Meyer Landsman is called to a murder scene in a cheap hotel — the same cheap hotel that Meyer calls home — his ex-wife and boss, Bina, is rather more interested in cleaning up the case before the Americans arrive than solving the murder. But Meyer's attention is snagged by a chess puzzle found next to the body and he sets out, his partner Berko in tow, to solve the mystery.

The book works both as a detective drama and as a story of redemption, for as Meyer gradually unravels the details murder, he finds himself confronting his difficult past, dealing with his alcoholism and reconciling himself to his ex-wife.

The characters are excellent from the lugubrious Meyer to his partner, half-Jewish and half-Tlingit, never entirely certain of his place in the world, through his ex-wife to the eccentric boundary maven and the clean-cut agents of the US reversion. The dialogue too, is something of a delight, making use of every single Yiddish expression to have made it into English — and, no doubt, more than a few that haven't — in a way that emphasises that the characters aren't speaking the same language as the Americans.

All in all, a most enjoyable book and a worthy award winner.