I tore through The Seymour Tapes (2005) in about two days. It was one of my purchases at the "Exposed" gift shop at the Tate Modern, but it doesn't seem, for whatever reason, to have made it into paperback in the U.S.
The novel is written as a series of transcripts of interviews between "Tim Lott" and members of Dr. Alex Seymour's circle of family and friends in the wake of Seymour's death. Seymour, a physician living in London, has become a media sensation after a video related to his murder was leaked online. As the story unravels, we learn of Seymour's increasingly elaborate installations of surveillance equipment in his own home--an operation that he hopes will restore the kind of domestic order that he feels is his fatherly responsibility. His foray into surveillance, however, puts him beyond the pale of normal social and sexual boundaries as he becomes increasingly close to the disturbed American Sherry Thomas, the owner of the company that lends him equipment.
Lott's set-up here is intriguing and topical, and the format of the book is a stroke of genius--the transcripts bring us as close as a text can to the issues of voyeurism, truth, and immediacy that underpin the story. Lott plays nicely with questions of narrative point-of-view and journalistic ethics, adding extra turns to an already twisted tale. The turns never feel labored, but I did find some of them disappointing--without giving anything away, I'll say that I think the ending makes this a much more traditional story of ethical violation than it feels at first, a return-to-normalcy that sacrifices some of the moral complexity that makes the set-up so exciting. The final abandonment of the transcript form in the novel's coda reveals some of this disappointing information, and it should have been cut. As it stands, the coda tries to frighten in an uncharacteristically simple way, kind of like someone jumping out of a closet and yelling "OOGA BOOGA BOOGA" at the end of an otherwise mature and upsetting psychological drama.
That drama is worth the forgettable ending. I'd recommend The Seymour Tapes pretty highly to any kind of reader, especially if you're interested in suspense novels, surveillance, or the difficulty of separating truth from fiction.
