In “Cold Echoes,” the seventh chapter (or episode) in Echoes, Bronson Bodine offers his thoughts on Human Nature:
“…personality isn’t that important. What really matters is character.” He smiled as he arrived at some kind of resolution. “And you have to be autonomous to possess character, don’t you?”
Traits of personality are “psychological” manifestations: psychological typologies and environmental imprints. Nature and nurture are important sources for describing personality—actions, emotions, dispositions, patterns of response, “mystique,” affect, and so on. However, traits of character are matters of a different and more important order. In Bodine’s worldview, who we are as unique individuals attends our flexibility, our honesty, our knowledge, and our ability to respond to the world around us—our ability to respond to what Wittgenstein calls “the stream of life”. We should—we must—exercise emotions, thinking and actions in appropriate ways. Throughout Echoes, Bodine and his team are challenged by a variety of circumstances that challenge their ability to analyze their situation, and then quickly—often precipitously—arrive at an appropriate response. It is not surprising that their various secret missions, scientific investigations and clashes with rival spies often are inner struggles to overcome personality and exercise character.
The “blurb” on the back of the novel, “The institution is the message,” is inspired by the title of Marshall McLuhan’s celebrated book, The Medium is the Massage. The line is directly quoted from the novel itself, as it is articulated by a character who is reflecting on the attenuation and corruption of traditional cultural and ethical institutions attending the proliferation of 21st Century corporate organization and the “hyperactive” proliferation of electronic communications, algorithmic social programming, and artificial intelligence. Complicating matters in this “space” of information overload, the pronounced decay of traditional ethical understanding produces further confusion, as well as providing the author with a narratological “tool” for producing strange and disturbing effects.
Although the agents of the Invisible Tower prevail (evidently) in their struggles and conquer the present, the legacy of the past and the uncertainty of the future remain significant and perhaps insurmountable challenges. The task of understanding and responding to these challenges are daunting, to say the least, and Bronson Bodine is confronted with struggles that test him to the utmost limits of his ability to see, to think, and to endure. The effects of narratological inquiry and moral decay so prominent in the second book, are in this third book pushed into the background, though they are in this way intensified; in new and subtle ways, the reader is stimulated into realms of epistemological un-reality. The idiosyncratic character of the narrative alternates among recognizable forms of modernist narrative, surrealism, and “pulp” fiction sensationalism. An uncanny “history” of “true” events, the shifting narrative enhances (but also veils) the presentation of thought and “stream-of-consciousness” in a world forcefully stripped of traditional cultural, moral and theological understanding.
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