Cowboy Angels

Having really enjoyed The Quiet War, I decided to follow it up with another of Paul McAuley's recent novels, Cowboy Angels, which, unsurprisingly perhaps, I really liked.

Set in a universe where the many worlds interpretation is a settled fact and spies can hop from one quantum reality to another as easily as catching a train, McAuley imagines how a parallel version of the CIA might set out to further its own interests. The eponymous cowboy angels are a group of elite undercover spooks, recruited by the Angleton-like Dick Knightly, to do as much dirty work as necessary to bring the various different instances of America together into the sprawling, anti-communist Pan-American Alliance.

The main character, Adam Stone, discharged from the Company with his reputation for honour and honesty intact, has retired to a semi-wilderness world where spends his time farming, silently falling in love with his dead partner's wife and doing the occasional bit of hunting. But when his former friend and fellow angel, Tom Waverly, begins a bizarre killing spree — killing dopplegangers of the same woman in a series of different realities — Adam finds himself caught up a spirally conspiracy that would have Knightly's fingerprints all over, were Knightly not comatose after a massive stroke.

Despite the differences of style and setting Cowboy Angels and The Quiet War seem to me to have a great deal in common. Both share the idea of a cold, quiet war — a conflict fought through propaganda, espionage and manupulation rather than by clashing armies — and both seem critical of the neoconservative attitude towards intervention in the affairs of other nations, be they the moons of Saturn, alternate instances of the United States, or, by analogy, governments rather closer to home.

Both novels also share McAuley's eye for details and characters. Although the bulk of the action in Angels is set in the early 1980s, technology in the Real America (and its client states) is anachronistically complete with cell phones and ultra-complicated quantum computers. All this is underscored by the state of technology in Nixon Sheaf, a reality clearly intended to be read as our own reality — Stone finds himself amused by the brick-like cellphones, while his colleague is not impressed by the overly sweet taste of, presumably, New Coke.

Of the two principal characters, Tom is very much a cowboy: constantly demanding Adam's trust despite his own rather less than trustworthy actions, reluctant to explain anything and constantly waiting to take advantage of the slightly slip. Adam, while not quite an angel, is pensive rather than reckless, doubtful of Tom's real motivations and constantly worried that he being manipulated into doing what his enemies in the Company want him to do, rather than doing the right thing.