Neuropath
by Scott Bakker

2008.
306 pages (with afterword).
Orion TPB.

“Only a small fraction of your brain is involved in conscious experience, which is why so much of what we do is unconscious. The bulk of your brain’s processing falls outside what you can experience; it simply doesn’t exist for your consciousness, not even as an absence. That’s why your thoughts simply come out of nowhere, apparently uncontrolled, undetermined… Yours and yours alone. [And] it goes deeper, trust me. Everything falls apart. Absolutely everything.”

Neuropath is a science fiction thriller. Using the latest findings of neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Scott Bakker makes an attempt at predicting what humans are, essentially — what the true nature of the human brain is, and how that true nature differs greatly from our perceptions of it. As such, the novel isn’t so much a novel as it is a piece of speculative non-fiction with a thin veil of fiction covering it. This is fairly obvious, as the fiction part is rather badly written. The thriller plot rarely gets especially tense, except from when it’s most heavily mixed up with the non-fiction, and the whole literary side of the novel is generally speaking not particularly well executed.

The non-fiction and the speculations on the other hand, now, those are a different matter entirely. Basically exploring the consequences of materialism to their very ends, Bakker’s subject matter is so dark and depressing “horror” might be a better label than “thriller”. Because in the end, there’s not really anything in it that thrills. Debunking the illusion that is free will, showing the arbitrariness of the correlation between our sensory input and our emotional output — no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to thrill me; all it does is fill me with a mind-numbing sense of horror.

Of course, it isn’t necessarily immediately relevant. That consciousness is an illusion produced by our brains doesn’t have to mean anything so long as we don’t experience it that way, so long as we’re content to feel for instance love without having to analyse it to shreds. That we can potentially prove that morality, religion, philosophy, emotion and what have you are nothing but rationalisations we’ve made for ourselves to allow us to do what we want or need (and if I was a religious man, I’d pray that this isn’t true), doesn’t mean that we have to do so.

Anyway, Neuropath is the scariest and most depressingly thought provoking book I’ve read in my life, and is likely to haunt me forever. So if you’re not into questioning existence, and would prefer not to know anything about these, to be honest, suicide-urge-inducing possibilities stay the fuck away from it. It’s a rather weak novel, of course, so people who hated the philosophical issue-raising in The Prince of Darkness — a precursor to Neuropath, as it turns out — should probably stay away from it. Also, as it turns out, ignorance actually is bliss.

6.5/10.