Hanōkizawa-san tells me to stop the car, and from the backseat points at an anonymous granite cliffside ten meters away. “There,” he says. “That’s where it came from.” We are driving south along a paved road built against the cliffs that fall into the Pacific outside the Japanese village of Yoshihama. He wants to show Yu Wada-Dimmer, our interpreter, and me the origin of the tsunami ishi, or “tsunami stone” that appeared on Yoshihama’s beach when the high waters of the 1933 tsunami receded. The stone, once used as a warning to low-living villagers, was then buried by man in the sixties, only to be unburied when the ocean surged inland once more on the afternoon of Friday, March 11, 2011.
I can just barely discern the scar of a large boulder ripped clean from the crag, but it could be the former home of any rock that has since tumbled to a saline grave. Eighty-five years have passed since 1933. Hanōkizawa is now 89, which means he was a child, four or five, when it happened. “How do you know this is where it came from?” I ask. “Because my father told me,” he replies.
Yuval Noah Harari may be the first global public intellectual to be native to the 21st century. Where other authors are carpetbaggers, hauling their 20th-century thinking into the new millennium, Mr Harari is its local boy done good. He comes with all the accoutrements of the modern pop thinker: a posh education (Oxford, followed by a teaching gig at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), two bestsellers and the obligatory TED talk. He even meditates for two hours a day.
And he is armed with a big idea: that human beings will change more in the next hundred years than they have in all of their previous existence. The combination of biotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI) may enable some people to be digitally enhanced, transforming what being human means. As this happens, concepts of life, consciousness, society, laws and morality will need to be revised.
Ceridwen Dovey’s third book, “In the Garden of the Fugitives,” is an elegant — at times, deceptive — narrative that sifts through the selected memories of two characters. Royce is an elderly wealthy man nearing the end of his life in Boston. Vita, a middle-aged South African woman, once a recipient of his generous fellowship, now lives in a small outback town in Australia. The narrative structure reflects an epistolary exchange (well, email), but the stories Royce and Vita tell each other move beyond the perceived boundaries of the digital missives, almost as if the characters are writing past each other as they reconstruct their somewhat broken personal histories.
But as the story reaches its climax, the tension between action and withholding becomes increasingly problematic. It’s not just that Lacroix is reticent, and that so much action happens off stage or invisibly. It’s also that when Lacroix does finally confess the full story of what happened in Spain, he reveals a paralysis in himself that we are never entirely convinced has been cured. Is this plausible psychology? Possibly. Does it show a conflict in Miller himself, between his appetite for writing a historical yarn and something quieter, more subtle and more inward? This seems just as likely.
That the phrase “the fall,” in the context of espionage fiction, usually refers to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall doesn’t entirely rinse it of its theological connotations. The Cold War has long been a backdrop against which to explore human frailties; that’s one of the reasons so many spy novels are backward-looking. But, like any careful spook, the best of such novels look both ways at once. In what we have to assume is the twilight of his career, John le Carré opted to interrogate his own past in the recent “A Legacy of Spies,” but took the opportunity to examine the present at the same time. If neither era showed human nature at its best, it was hard not to discern between the lines a certain amount of nostalgia for the world before the fall.