Thomas Mullen: The Revisionists

When I first picked up Thomas Mullen's The Revisionists, I thought it was going to be a traditional Time Patrol novel.  Some agency in the future sends operatives back into the past to either capture criminals who have gone back to use their superior technology to commit various crimes or to prevent those who would like to prevent certain events from taking place or perhaps to bring about a different future. For example, one might attempt to prevent the holocaust by assassinating Hitler long before he ruled Germany.  The agency then would attempt to prevent the assassination because of the fear that this would change the future, even though it meant allowing the deaths of millions of people during WWII.   Preventing WWII  might make for a better future, but it could also bring about one that was worse: averting WWII in the 1940s might bring about a nuclear war in the 50s.

Thomas Mullen gives us this, but he also does something more.  Normally, the focus would be on the Time Agent's attempts to either prevent something that would happen or to make sure that something did happen, so as to ensure that the future remains unchanged.  In this novel, Zed (or Troy Jones, his false contemporary identity) is sent back to counter the efforts of the hags, or historical agitators.  These people, from Zed's own time, are dissidents who believe the government is a dictatorship and go back into time to prevent events from happening which would lead to the years of warfare that would eventually bring the future world-wide government to power.

While this all sounds very typical, it is only part of the story.  Mullen not only follows the Agent, but he also introduces several plot threads which all eventually, and logically,  come together at the end.  It is a tangled plot which seemingly involves the FBI, the CIA, Enhanced Awareness (a company that creates and sells advanced surveillance technology to anybody), various whistle blowers (one from a law firm and another from the CIA), and a young Indonesian woman who somehow manages to become a domestic slave to a South Korean diplomat living in the US.

The tale is closer to being an espionage thriller than a typical time travel novel, especially if one ignores the "Z" chapters which focus on Zed's activities as he strives make sense of what has become a very confusing situation.  He must now contend not only with the hags but also with various contemp (Zed's term for the people of the time he now inhabits)  forces, all of whom seem determined to stop him.  Along with Zed's problems, the various contemp heroes and heroines (Leo, Tasha and Sari) all find themselves being confronted by various strangers, all of whom carry badges from one or more agencies--some governmental, some quasi-governmental and claiming to be working for a governmental agency, and some who seem to be thugs really to kill somebody or anybody for some inexplicable reason, at first anyway.

To add to the general confusion, Zed encounters a fellow Agent, who has also been assigned the same task, which is something that normally never happens.  In addition, when they compare notes, they find that each has been given only partial information about the present situation, again something very odd.  To complicate matters even further, the fellow agent expresses some doubts about their mission and their government.

Zed is a complex character, or at least, he becomes one, as he moves from total acceptance that the world he comes from is the best of all possible worlds (or so he is frequently told by the government, so frequently I began to suspect propaganda rather than a factual appraisal)  to confusion, and then to doubts about the government, his role, and even his identity, especially as he gradually loses most of the special technology that allows him to function in ways superior to the contemp forces.

Is he really an agent from the future or is he psychotic and reinterpreting his past to fit in with his delusions?  Troy Jones was a real person whose short life actually resembled Zed's life, including the loss of his wife and children.  Zed also only needed minor plastic surgery to make him resemble Troy.     This is why Zed was given this identity.  Since his superior technology no longer works, Zed really has nothing to prove that he really comes from the future.  I think P. K. Dick would be very happy at this point.

Overall Comments:  I'm going to take a close look at other works by Thomas Mullen, as his writing style (clear and striaghtforward), characterization, and plot construction  really impress me.