DeLillo, Picador, £16.99 Cosmopolis by Don Well...the plot sounds thin - billionnaire spends his day crossing Manhattan in a stretch limo! But big themes are wrapped up in one man's increasingly alienated view of the world - and eventually of himself. Eric Packer is a money market speculator, so rich and powerful that he's surrounded by bodyguards, keeping him under constant video surveillance He is continuously advised by "the complex" - an intelligence centre - on his security needs and any imminent His musings on how much he is making or losing minute to minute interplay with persistent anxiety about his health and safety as he gazes out of the window at the teeming masses. As his limo crawls its way through the streets, we find there's more than rush-hour traffic behind the gridlock. There's a presidential visit, a demo and a rapper's funeral. The protest - possibly the first significant literary portrayal of the anti-capitalist movement - is negatively presented as a violent stunt. This is Packer's world-view of course, and in him DeLillo has created a deeply unsympathetic character.
Marx and Engels are referred to in passing and the Communist Manifesto quoted. This seems to raise the ques tion of their contemporary relevance -The exploitation of time as the The money markets and the drive to constant technological innovation are "the future sucking out the present". Packer repeatedly returns to this in his obsession with the obsolescence of language: how rapidly the words that describe the world become outdated.
Cosmopolis makes no reference to the attack on the Twin Towers. It is dated in April 2000, prior to 9/11 and just pre-Bush - under a mythical President Midwood.
But there is a feeling of claustropho bia and paranoia. In the midst of the jams, the assassination of the managing director of the IMF is caught live on the limo TV and constantly replayed on the news
If there is a suggestion of impending crisis, the implication is that its causes are to be found in the heart of American capitalism itself.
There are parallels with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Here the journey is through the concrete jungle to the cold heart of the cosmopolis where Packer meets his nemesis.
DeLillo's perspective is detached and ambiguous and it's unlikely he intended the book to be read in this way. But his writing, like all the best, carries multiple interpretations and layers of meaning.
The cover of his earlier Underworld published before 9/11, spookily anticipated the events of that day by showing a bird or plane flying in front of an image of the Twin Towers, looking like tombstones.
Cosmopolis re-emphasises the point with a photo of a New York skyscraper at night through a rainsplattered window. Visions of imperial decline?