Richard Morgan: Market Forces

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Anyone bored to death by the petty simmerings and amateur corporate back-stabbings of Donald Trump' TV vehicle The Apprentice might get a thrill from Richard Morgan' Market Forces.

Set about 60 years hence, the nasty corporate world has become so much nastier. The zek-tivs of this future prove themselves not just in the boardroom and on the profit sheet but on the motorway.

A corporate challenge means legally sanctified road rage, to the death. The winner brings back the loser's number plate.

You have to hand it to Morgan, he has done away with the car (or whatever vehicle of the future dreamed up by the author) chase scene obligatory in blockbuster sci-fi thrillers and has written a script/novel that is basically one big car chase.

There is time out for the also obligatory sex scenes and some off-wheels violence on the mean streets of the Zones, where the poor and dispossessed hang out killing each other, if they can't manage to get hold of a zek-tiv, and taking drugs.

The protagonist, Chris Faulkner, a legendary road-rager and upwardly mobile zek-tiv in the burgeoning conflict investment industry, is from the Zones.

Conflict industry means encouraging small wars of revolution, gambling on which tin-pot dictator will be next to take over and supplying him and his armies with arms and money.
Chris is married to a mechanic, which is a novelty, and means he has the hottest, meanest wheels on the streets.

But his wife, the barely sketched Carla, disapproves terribly of what hubbie does for a living. And she has a father who still lives in the Zones, a failed Marxist writer who sprouts tedious stuff from the texts and who the author really should have had run over early on.

The trouble with Market Forces is that Morgan has not been content to write an almost-credible thriller set in the almost-credible hell of a corporate future. He has also made a heavy-handed attempt at a moral warning: about greed and corrupt business and governments.

We would have got it without the device of Daddy and his texts, Carla and her tsking.

And because the goodies are as awful as the baddies, it is hard to care. Cool
car-crash scenes though. They should introduce something of the kind to liven up The Apprentice.

Gollancz, $35

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.