The Dying Light [Paperback]

The author's aim is admirable. The style is good and the action interesting, though there are some improbabilities. What is best is the exposure of the dangers of our present increasingly secretive, insidious society, watching, recording, stop-and-searching, bugging, and intruding into the everyday lives of the citizens of our country. The excuse is reasonable: we must protect ourselves from terrorists and the enemy within. Also, cctv, for example, is very useful in detecting and preventing crime. But power grows by what it feeds on. Scores of new acts limiting the people's freedom have come into force in the last twenty years. That is not to mention the secret machinations of the controllers. What we must most fear is what we don't know.

Paradoxically, the snag with this gloom-casting novel is its optimism. Despite the newly invented surveillance machines, the all-over telephone recordings, the accurate pin-pointing of where everyone is, our heroes and about a thousand of their supporters evade supervision and walk through police and military barriers as if by magic. Politicians wary of the new developments continue to function at Westminster even after they have been exposed. Suspected dissidents are listed, their life histories recorded down to the last pimple, their photographs distributed, but they walk through. In reality, the power mongers, if they finally take over, will not be so gentle, will not stop for a chat, will not reject torture and prison camps, as we already know. George Orwell's 1984 is referred to in this book, and that is surely a more realistic view of a dark future. Not a happy ending. But if The Dying Light is a call for us all to be more aware of the bad things that happen around us, it is welcome. And not a bad read!

Henry Porter has written one of the best thrillers I've ever read. The Dying Light is set in Britain in the near future, where the tentacles of the surveillance state have been extending their reach throughout society. Our rulers are driven by misguided paternalism; their sense of right and wrong has been subverted by the inevitably corrupting influence of unaccountable power.

The heroine, Kate Lockhart, is thrown into a dangerous attempt to uncover the rotteness of the government after her estranged best friend is killed in a bomb blast and puts her unwillingly in the centre of a last-ditch effort to save British democracy.

The best thing about this book is Mr Porter's characterisation: he vividly describes all the actors in the drama. He introduces us to an unlikely band of heroes and villains, and people sitting uneasily inbetween. All the characters have human doubts and fears, but those on the good side also burn brightly with a deeply human longing to live freely and make their own decisions about their own lives. They retain a moral compass that the government lost long ago thanks to the death of ideology and to the cult of managerialism and centralisation.

Though it would be wrong to expose the twists and surprises in the plot (of which there are enough to make the book almost impossible to put down!), it is worth stressing - as Mr Porter does in his Afterword - that all the laws used and abused by his fictional government are already on the statute book. So on one level this book is a frightening and thought-provoking exposé of a country that has sleep-walked into putting too much trust to politicians and civil servants who rarely reciprocate by trusting the people to get on with their own lives without nannying or worse. The only thing standing between Britain in 2009 and Mr Porter's fiction is the relative decency of our current rulers.

At the same time The Dying Light is also an uplifting story of the bravery of some very human people in the face of authoritarianism run rampant. In this way it reminds me of the outstanding film The Lives Of Others: just as the film movingly depicts the heroism of the dissident and of the Stasi officer whose humanity makes him rebel against the machine in which he is a human cog, the key characters of this book include both public servants whose moral qualms trump deference to authority and would-be free spirits. Buy this book - you will finish it in a few sittings but you will have much food for thought well after you read the last page.

I have just finished this book, delaying departure for a holiday because I just had to finish it. Everything about it works magnificently - the characters are original and credible, the plot is like a Rolls Royce engine, the pace and tension superb. But it is the message that will last, I think. It should drive everyone who reads it to sign up for Liberty and No2ID.net. This is a classic word-of-mouth situation, where everyone tells all their friends they simply must read it. They simply must! Even if they are part of the great British apathetic classes, they'll get a rattling good yarn to enjoy.