Assessment:
Plot: Gabbay’s novel is a quickly-paced psychological thriller. Gabbay shifts between protagonist Ula Mishkin’s quest to solve her housemate Mia’s murder and Ula’s interpretations of Mia’s memories to keep the plot moving. This fractured way of storytelling heightens the tension and allows readers to experience Ula’s confusion and fear.
Prose/Style: Gabbay’s prose is clear, direct, and moves the plot along nicely. Each character, including the secondary cast, has a distinct voice and personality.
Originality: In the hands of a lesser writer, the concept of downloading a victim’s memory to solve her murder would be hard to swallow. Gabbay offers just enough science to make the premise plausible and spends the rest of his novel focusing on the interpersonal dynamics that really drive the story. Fans of the thriller genre may spot the twist ending coming, but will still enjoy the ride.
Character Development: The characters are distinct, memorable, and convincing. Ula Mishkin is believable as an awkward but brilliant recluse. Although Mia does not undergo significant character growth, given that readers only meet her through Ula’s interpretation of the co-ed’s downloaded memory, this is understandable.
Date Submitted: April 03, 2020
Access Point, by T. R. Gabbay
Access Point, the latest work of novelist T. R. Gabbay, is a game changer in many senses. It marks a significant departure in theme and setting for Gabbay, author of a critically acclaimed cycle of spy thrillers that follow American agent Jack Teller through a series of nightmarish crises: the espionage crucible of Lisbon during World War Two; the Cold War backdrop to the Kennedy assassination in Berlin and Florida; the unending tensions set in motion by the Iranian revolution and the fall of the Shah in 1978.
Nightmare is also the operative metaphor of Access Point. But its plunge into the dark shadows of contemporary life is arguably far more unsettling. The subject, put simply, is the fatal knifing in England of a young American art student, Mia Fraser, and a determined detective’s search for her killer. But there is nothing simple about the murder, the murderer or the investigation. If the book draws on classic crime motifs that reach back a century -- the midnight slashing of an attractive woman in London, the erratic efforts of Scotland Yard to solve the crime -- its subtext is the unleashing of a thoroughly modern scientific revolution.
In a display of writerly choreography that shifts adroitly between the personal anxieties of Mia’s landlady Ula Mishkin, a distinguished neurological researcher with a tragic past, and Mia’s own private thoughts, Gabbay trains his prose on the murky terrain where high technology encounters the complexities of the human mind. This is a novel about memory in both realms: Mia’s and Ula’s on the one hand, and on the other hand a computer program of Ula’s devising that invades the brain’s data bank, decodes the information stored there and copies it.
In short, the program is capable of “mating” with the operating system of the brain -- a.k.a. the mind -- taking possession of its wealth of data. The effect is to lead both the reader and the investigating police officer, Detective Inspector Sarah Boyd, into a dizzying hall of mirrors where nothing at all is clear, much less the plain truth about what transpired that night in the shadows of a London street. Eventually, the truth does emerge -- the motives and identity of the murderer are unearthed -- in a shattering collision between reality and appearances that only seems inevitable after the fact.
Access Point is a bravado performance by the author, an accomplished screenwriter as well as a novelist, known for his air-tight plots. Gabbay makes the technological feats behind the mating of Mia’s mind and a computer program entirely believable and compelling. Justifiably so: As recently as a decade ago, this book’s storyline and narrative mechanisms would have consigned it to the arcane universe of science fiction. But not today. Innovations related to the development of artificial intelligence, which relies on many of the same mathematical premises that enable Ula Mishkin’s unsettling computer program, are no longer a matter of fiction or a distant imagined future.
They’re in place and evolving all around us today, untested in their formidable powers and heedless of potential consequences.
Frank Viviano is a veteran correspondent for National Geographic Magazine and the author of seven books.
