As a person who grew up in the midst of anarchy, the
excitement for me didn’t start right away. But what provokes a criminal crisis
in teenage Alanna or her boyfriend, is not as immediately evident as the secret
forces that keep her clandestine endeavors in “solitary darkness”. For the most part, her place in the cyber
world has been well-portrayed. It is a novel that is difficult to discuss
without giving away the plot.
“She remained motionless with arms hanging from the sides
of the chair. Secret Service and FCCU. Overkill for a simple breaking and
entering. She wondered which of her scams popped up on their radar. Or how long
they had been watching her. Whatever evidence they had, she had no intention of
revealing anything surrounding her scams or the break-in.”
T. K. Falco’s minimally punctuated prose shows us a world
hinged between trust and distrust, jolting us out of our slumber of ignorance
to watch the filthy power of the combined threat of information technology and
cyber crimes to the American financial sector. It would be interesting to see
if Alanna would keep all of the things surrounding her scams safely concealed. She
is ahead of fed agents and she lives in fear almost every minute of her life,
not really able to resolve doubts and mysteries but trying her best to come
clean. By the time the plot recedes into the center of horrible events, Alanna
negotiates twists and turns of the author, in scene after scene, revealing a
unique narrative strategy, where it is hard to ignore the cinematic echoes in
the flow. She makes us understand the “sanctity of mistrust” and falls foul of
an invisible crisis that spurs her to leave town forever.
A democracy’s greatest threat is not external, but internal
in nature—its own people
turning anarchists and posing challenges to a State that constantly strives to
maintain order. AntiAmerica makes it clear that all along, Falco has
asked us to witness anarchy not in order to understand it but to accept its
incomprehensible existential reality in our complex world of modern capitalism.
This story will arguably go down as a tale of danger from anarchist
insecurities in the financial world.
Sidd Burth
22th January, 2019
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