Athena, Holding Your Hair, Whispering In Your Ear

For me a few are enough, one is enough, none is enough. This is not for the many, but for you. We are audience enough for each other.

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This is an older cyberpunk novel (the first in a trilogy) that had slipped past me until now. The style is techno-Noire, a future detective story soaked in drugs and sleaze, and set somewhere in the Middle East or North Africa. The story is conceptually interesting in part because of the setting (there's not much Maghrebi cyberpunk out there), and in part because it leans hard into exploring the future of gender.

But the book was written in 1987, and it shows its age in a few places. For example, while the book takes on gender fluidity as one of its main themes, it's gender politics are pretty uneven. The main character begins the story in a relatively egalitarian state of mind, and is in a (more or less) loving relationship with a trans woman. But over the course of the book he either becomes (or reveals himself to be) increasingly, disturbingly misogynistic. Because he's also the narrator it's hard to disentangle him from the author. That is to say, it's hard to know whether the author is setting him up to be a "lovable rogue" or actually intends for us to dislike him, but the fact that he also becomes less sympathetic in other ways as the story goes on perhaps points to the latter. Regardless of the author's goals, I found the first half of the book more enjoyable than the back half as I became increasingly uneasy about the "hero."

Setting aside my feelings about the protagonist, the book is well written and has some interesting conceits and grace notes peppered throughout. For example, the title is a reference to Bob Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb Blues, which the author further quotes as an epigraph. It's a clever choice because the song's lyrics really capture the "den of vice" vibe the story is shooting for.¹ He also does some interesting literary, metatextual riffing (for example with James Bond and Nero Wolfe).

Problems aside, the book was enjoyable overall, and scratched an itch for me, so it is cautiously recommended. It's probably more of a three-and-a-half-stars-type book, so I rounded up. I intend to read the sequels.