The Artefact

In Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers there is a spaceship buried in the woods of a small New England town. The ship has been under the earth for hundreds of years, its occupants long dead. Yet as townsfolk get curious and start digging up the alien artefact, its radiation seeps out and wreaks dramatic changes on people around. Not even HG Wells, one of the diggers reflects, predicted an invasion of ghosts.

For Frank Landau in Nina Allan‘s Conquest the ghosts have been here for a long time. Frank hangs out on UFO forums. Frank believes that he is being watched by people he calls ‘the n-men’. Frank’s paranoid. He prefers the postal service to email, because to his mind it is

Like sending an email in slow motion, the slow spray of data through the fabric of space, a burgeoning of spores like the vortex of midges that swarmed the copse at twilight or after rain.

Frank’s thoughts are structured like this, measured and beautiful, but often his anxiety takes over, pressuring his words, so the prose deteriorates into panicky run-on sentences:

For Frank the anxiety of knowing he was under surveillance was less than the anxiety of being spied on in secret. You could even say there was something energising in knowing for sure, a sense of forward momentum even of power yet he knew he should be careful not so much of them as of himself the ceaseless careless spooling of his unguarded thoughts. 

Frank’s problem is diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder. He’s been in and out of locked psychiatric wards since the age of fourteen. Despite this great psychological drag, Frank has a lot going for him. He can code, well enough to earn a freelance living. He still lives with his mum because he is afraid of change, but there’s a lot of love there and he is an active participant in his family. He has a girlfriend, Rachel, who can get past his craziness because she loves him. Frank doesn’t have the monomania of the typical conspiracy theorist. His brother Michael describes going to a UFO conference and being struck by ‘the way the speakers seemed to take it for granted that everyone in the audience thought the same way they did, that they all knew the truth and anyone who didn’t agree with them was either an idiot sheep or part of the conspiracy.’ Frank is never like this – he doesn’t force his ideas on others, they are not at the forefront of his conversation, they are more like a quiet hum in the background. Michael also says: ‘I could never get my head round it, the way he could be perfectly normal, sitting there having a pint and laughing about some show he’d seen on TV and yet all the time he’d be having these thoughts, these beliefs that stood completely outside the way most people see the world.’

Frank’s key text is a novel called The Tower, written by an ex serviceman named John C Sylvester in the 1950s. It is an SF novel in which the Earth has concluded a war with a distant civilisation called ‘Gliese’ – concluded successfully, though at great human cost. A New York architect named Archimbaud Aspen wants to build a gigantic tower to mark Earth’s victory over the aliens. It is called the Conquest Tower and Aspen sees it as ‘a city within the city, an exclusive gated community that would function as a magnet for trade and an advertisement for its creator’s planet-sized ambition.’ Aspen’s big talking point is that he wants to build the tower from stone imported from the ruins of the defeated Gliese. This stone, unfortunately, is not ordinary stone. The artisans who build Conquest Tower ‘spoke of the malleability of the stone, or the stone ‘knowing what it was doing’, of the affinity they felt for it even’. Aspen himself is a paragon of self-confidence. His fluent vision drives the project to success. Yet once the tower is actually built and he is living in it, Aspen starts having bad dreams – and in these dreams it is New York in ruins, a burning wartime hellscape, and alien soldiers are chasing him. Aspen’s faithful PA Sidney Kruger notices a change in him: ‘an increasing propensity for small mistakes.’ Aspen is afraid to leave the building because this makes him feel like ‘whole aspects of himself were coming adrift, releasing themselves from their moorings and unspooling inside his brain.’ The problem – understated but obvious – is that the stone itself is alive. 

After twenty years of a settled life, Frank takes a trip abroad for the first time, to Paris to meet fellow enthusiasts from the UFO forum. Nine months later, he hasn’t come back, or made contact in any way. Sick with worry, Rachel hires a private detective, Robin Clay. Robin begins to unravel the mystery of Frank’s disappearance. The more conventional parts of the novel are about Robin’s investigation in the present, and her interrogation of the past. She is uncovering something huge, and so are we. Reading Conquest is to be in thrall to a evolving mystery, colossal and gorgeous. It is the kind of novel that defies analysis. In the face of Allan’s spectacular horizons the critical part of your brain just short-circuits, leaving you to enjoy the book on a deeper level. 

Disappointments? Longueurs? Sure. Allan includes lengthy essays from Frank’s friends on the UFO forum, which are beautifully written but also annoying because they make explicit the themes already so well developed in the story sequences. The precocious legend of Frank Landau gets irritating after a while – he is compared to a medieval saint near the end of the book, and by this point you agree with Robin’s advice to Rachel: ‘You have already given twenty years of your life to him. You need to think about yourself, about your future.’ Among their commonalities, the characters have a fondness for Bach, talk about him endlessly, comparing different recordings, the language of music is key, but again we already understand this, just from Frank’s early lines: ‘Words were slippery… So unlike code, or music, which had to be rendered perfectly or it wouldn’t run.’ Allan’s prose is so brilliant and well thought out you can understand the connection with music altogether, and I wonder if she actually based some of her sentences on the Goldberg Variations, as Thomas Harris was said to.

Whatever Allan was doing, it has worked. It’s rare that you read a book that makes you feel you’re a different person after finishing it.