"Teresa was target training by the age of ten. Her accuracy with a weapon thrilled her. She recognized as natural the weight of the weapon in her hand, the way it balanced there, the jolt of adrenaline that flowed when the recoil kicked at her arm and shoulder, and because these were exciting to her, the condition of gun ownership and use was integral to her personality and identity." - Christopher Priest, The Extremes
Gun violence, gun violence, gun violence, gun violence - The Extremes, Christopher Priest's 1998 novel about Teresa Ann Gravatt traveling to sleepy small town Bulverton on the southern coast of England, the site where a gunman went berserk and killed 27 people in a shooting spree the previous summer.
Teresa had her own good reasons for making the trip - her beloved husband Andy, acting in the line of duty as FBI agent, was shot dead by a gunman's bullet during a similar shooting spree on the exact same summer day in a small town in Texas. Added to this, Teresa was herself raised in England as a little girl before her parents moved to the US, thus she feels a deep kinship with the country and culture of England.
There are no children as she and Andy decided to devote themselves to their respective careers as FBI agents. After more than ten years of marriage, Teresa is now a heartsick widow in her early 40s and takes the bureau up on their offer of leave of absence to better come to terms with her grief. She senses vaguely that speaking to the survivors in Bulverton will give her the emotional support she so desperately craves.
A word on Teresa’s background which lead her to become an FBI agent. The most important person in Teresa’s life while growing up was her dad, a career Army man and gun fanatic - he kept a loaded gun in every room of the house, subscribed to all the gun magazines, continually palled around with his gun buddies and took every opportunity to shoot guns. Her father was so proud when Teresa became quite expert in firing guns herself, winning many national shooting competitions.
Yet there was something unsettling about this macho gun culture. Teresa recounts: “She hated the way her father’s personality had changed when his gun friends were around, or when he was practicing with his weapons: it was as if he grew several inches in all directions, taller, broader, rounder, thicker. His voice was louder, he moved with more energy.” And after Andy had his skull shattered by a bullet, Teresa's attitude toward her background surrounded by guns and her great skill shooting guns takes an abrupt shift.
Once in Bulverton, Teresa decides to conduct her own investigation of gunman Gerry Grove's killing spree. However, the more Teresa attempts to talk to townspeople, including Nick and Amy who run the hotel where she's staying, the more she unearths the timetable and other details of events via police reports, accounts of eye witnesses, newspaper articles, the more she senses things simply don't add up - preeminently, an unaccounted for two hour gap between Grove leaving the local building dedicated to virtual reality technology and walking to town with his guns to commit mass murder.
Thus, there's drama aplenty in Bulverton but the real intensity for Teresa takes place in the worlds of the aforementioned virtual reality technology known as ExEx, short for Extreme Experience. And let me tell ya folks, it ain't called Extreme for nothing.
Teresa has had previous encounters with such programs, which are, incidentally, infinitely more advanced then anything available today (please keep in mind this is Christopher Priest science fiction). Back in her years training with the FBI, as a way to better understand and deal with mass murders, using ExEx, Teresa entered simulations of the actual past, such as the 1966 University of Texas tower shootings where Charles Whitman, a former Marine, went on the attack. Like other bureau trainees, Teresa will enter multiple times, taking on the role, in turn, of bystander, victim, law enforcement officer and even the gunman himself. Frequently, the simulation will end when the trainee is shot dead. A traumatic experience to be sure, but through such training, the young FBI agents learn fast. Or so the theory goes.
Teresa can hardly believe it - the ExEx programs in Bulverton are even more sophisticated. Wow! With all the new genius software programmers around the globe, upon receiving her injection of 619 neurochips (again, this is science fiction) and entering a scenario, she enters an entire world. And it's all so real. Teresa asks: how do they do that? The articulate gal at the ExEx facility tells her about new developments with shareware and contiguity. Teresa's skills as a sharpshooter pays off- she kills more times than she is killed. As readers, we follow her every step, every shot and every bloody death - an extreme reading experience. Make that extreme extreme.
In one ExEx scenario Teresa assumes the identity of a hard-core porn movie star - one of the major attraction for ExEx enthusiasts since there's such a close connection between sexuality and aggression, sexuality and violence, sexuality and death.
Teresa takes ExEx to even more extremes - she enters the world of Bulverton as Gerry Grove on the day of the killings - her mind and his mind interact, at various point even merge. She can't take the craziness and extracts herself from the program. Then, after scanning the computer menu for other scenarios, she chooses Kingwood City, Texas on that very same fateful day in June when her dear husband Andy was killed by a gunman on a spree.
What follows will be familiar to Christopher Priest fans as the jolt of the weird. Time and space turn, bend and curve beyond the conventional three dimensions. What is the real world, so called, and what is virtual Extreme Experience? What are the boundaries and what happens when each one blends into the other? In this way, in addition to violence, I judge The Extremes as a highly philosophical novel about the very nature and expansion of our perceptions. Ready for such extremes? If so, this ingenious Christopher Priest is a must read.
British author Christopher Priest, born 1943
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