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Review [published October 2003]
Richard Powers: Plowing The Dark
Chris Mitchell
Plowing The Dark is nothing if not a novel of ideas. Set
in the 1980s and 1990s, Richard Powers’ novel juxtaposes
two parallel narratives – one concerning the rise
of virtual reality, computer generated simulation that
reached to become indistinguishable from reality – and
the other concerning Taipur Martin, an American taken
hostage and held in the Lebanon. These narratives may
seem incongruous at first, but both concern the same
thing – the nature of reality.
For Adie Karpol, the technophobe artist called on to
give visual shape to the computer realities generated
by the immersive environment known as The Cavern,
fooling her own senses into believing the simulation in
front of her is real becomes her daily quest. For Taipur
Martin, the American teacher held hostage in solitary
confinement for a length of time so long he cannot
even measure it, trying to stay sane amongst almost
total sensory deprivation becomes a contest of wills
with himself. Flickering behind these two narratives
are the epoch-changing events which dominated and
dictated the last two decades’ world history – Tianamen
Square, the collapse of communism and the first Gulf
BUY Richard Powers books online from and
War. Plowing The Dark is the sort of novel you soon
realise will repay a second reading even before you’ve
finished the first.
Karpol’s grappling with the hideous complexities
of computer code that live under the bonnet of virtual
reality gives Powers the perfect device to trace the arcane
history of its geek genesis, which in turn brings
in discussions of mathematics, economics and, well,
the structure of the universe itself. In a similar way
to Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs, Powers takes the
computer as the single most important artefact of the
last two decades and examines its impact upon our
reality as much as our creation of new realities using it.
Traditionally art has fulfilled the function of creating
new realities, and Powers name drops a vast array of
classical artists in conversations describing the nature
of art and its irreducibility to a binary sequence. Powers’
peripheral characters are clearly ciphers to embody
certain viewpoints, while the central characters in both
narratives grapple with a tsunami of thought of which
they can never fully gain control. Indeed, the novel has
this effect on the reader as well as its protagonists –
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