The Rhesus Chart

[sawyl]

More from Charlie Stross, this time in the form of his fifth Laundry novel, The Rhesus Chart. This finds Bob Howard, civil servant, networks guy, and now necromancer, up against a threat that absolutely everyone knows can't possible exist: vampires.

While Bob is slowly trying to process the consequences of the events of The Fuller Memorandum, including his wife's anger at his decision expose a civilian friend to the eldritch world of the Laundry, a group of clever young quants called the Scrum have accidentally stumbled across a piece of arcane maths that has triggered extreme photosensitivity, strange hypnotic abilities, and a general craving for blood. Being children of the media age, the Scrum quickly realise that they've become vampires and place their usual work on hold, using agile methods to determine the exact parameters of their new condition.

Their actions do not go unnoticed. Working on an algorithm to identify cases of magic-induced dementia in the NHS database, Bob picks up a cluster of rapid onset K-syndrome in a cleaning firm in Docklands. Drilling down further he traces all the cases back to a particular bank and promptly pitches up on doorstep of the Scrum's new basement lair. Here he finds himself confronted with a nightmare situation: a nest of vampires headed up by Mhari Murphy, his toxic ex-girlfriend from the days of The Atrocity Archives. Fortunately Bob doesn't so much wield the stake as tie the vampires up in red tape, but as he does so he starts to wonder whether events are being manipulated by someone offstage.

The Rhesus Chart is a solid addition to the Laundry mythos and Stross has a lot of fun with the idea of the vampire in popular culture: the first page of the book starts with Mo debunking the idea of a creature being able to live on human blood; later, once Bob has uncovered the nest, he gets tasked with reading every pulp vampire novel in the hope of discovering something about their powers; and the Scrum follow a similar model, with the added advantage of being able to test each theory with a matching experiment. Needless to say Stross finds a clever way to integrate the idea of vampirism with his existing universe, even using it to expand the backstory of an existing and deeply sinister fixture of the Howard-O'Briens' everyday life.

The rehabilitation of Mhari Murphy is nicely handled too. Appearing as a minor and deeply disturbed character in The Atrocity Archives, Rhesus shows her initially as an accomplished manager and adept, not to say cunning, manipulator, and later as something of a tragic figure who has taken on something in ignorance that comes with a whole load of unpleasant and unforeseen consequences. Mhari also shows how far Bob has come from his first appearance, massively underestimating him based on her decade-old memories, until he points out that there is no way that his old self would have been sent in as point man to investigate a nest of baby vampires. And indeed by the end of the book it's very clear that he has become, step by step and incident by incident, fully post-human — and not necessarily in good way.

And the conclusion of the novel is shockingly terrible when it comes; and all the more so because Stross has Bob steps back from his duties of narrator and relates events in the dispassionate tone of the Laundry's official report on the unfolding situation, which just emphasises the awfulness of events and underscores how little we know of something of characters, having only ever seen them manifesting their office personas. It's a real spearpoint moment: although it has a certain inevitability, not least in terms of Bob's trajectory, that doesn't mean it doesn't pack a real emotional punch.

Highly recommended but definitely not to be read as a standalone novel: the story is peppered with obscure code names and casual references to earlier events and ongoing characters that you're simply expected to know. But that's OK: it's a good excuse to go back and read or re-read the preceding novels...