The Night Sessions

As mentioned yesterday, I've been reading Ken MacLeod's The Night Sessions, which I highly recommend. Here's a quick overview followed by a brief ramble on why I found the story troubling.

In a Scotland where religion has been all but stamped out and the engines of the state ignore the existence of personal belief, the death of a priest in an explosion comes as something of a shock to Edinburgh's finest. Brought in to investigate the bombing, DI Adam Ferguson, a veteran of the God Squads, struggles to find a motive for the murder after ruling out the usual suspects: gas leaks, irate ex-lovers, even vengeful parishioners.

Things become more serious when the Bishop of St Andrews is assassinated, a set of extremist Covenanter pamphlets are found in a church and a goth girl and DJ boyfriend uncover a link with a Neo-Gnostic group. Pursuing the links back, Ferguson and his crew track the evidence back to a religious fanatic, who may or may not be dead, with a plan to celebrate the anniversary of the start of the Faith Wars in grand style.

The Night Sessions is an excellent book, a clever mix of a near-future police procedural with a novel ideas. I think it might just be MacLeod's best book so far.

But I also found it deeply troubling. I found myself initially cheering for the secular Scotland that appears early on in the book. It seems so cool with it's robot police droids, goth-girl philosophers, it's space elevators and solettas. But as the story unfolds, the horrific price of the secular republic becomes clear: countries bankrupted by the Faith Wars; the police forming God Squads, taking the fury of the mob into the churches and against the religious, torturing and beating religion out of the public sphere. So this apparently ideal world is actually founded on a complete and bloody betray of the basic principles of the liberal state.

Worse yet, Adam Ferguson, the likable DI leading the murder investigation, was a key member of the God Squads. Although he has the decency to be embarrassed about his actions, it's very clear that Ferguson doesn't feel any guilt for them, believing that he was simply doing what was necessary. He continues to feel this way despite dark hints from his boss that the only reason they are tolerated is because the secular state has resulted in a more peaceful society than the the state of the Faith Wars, and that if the secular state should fail, the public will turn on Ferguson and his ilk, digging up the the skeletons of the Second Enlightenment and using them against those who acted against the religious groups.

What disturbs is the way that MacLeod has put his finger on a particular feeling of frustration on the part of atheists with the way that religious groups seem to be warping some aspects of society, especially education. For some, this anger seems to give them sufficient reasons to ignore one of the basic tenet of liberalism — that all societies hold a multiplicity of views and the one of the principle reasons for the state is to arbitrate conflicts between right holders — in order to create a society closer to their own image.

Of the other ideas present in the novel, some, such as theories of mind and simulation theory, are familiar from MacLeod's previous works but all are given an interesting spin thanks to their involvement with religion — I think he has the most religious set of robots since Isaac Asimov's short story Reason!

The book also works as a detective novel. I managed to work out a few — but not many! — of the leads before Ferguson, but I'll admit that the ending kept me guessing right up until the last moment. But this may have been artifact of having recently read The Execution Channel, with its deus ex machina conclusion.

I think that Sessions is probably the perfect companion to The God Delusion. For just as Dawkins encourages people to think the irrationalities of religion, MacLeod shows us the dangers we open ourselves to should we decide with utter certainty that our own rationality gives us sufficient reasons to limit the behaviours of others.