
Bandwidth
By Angus Morrison
We sometimes relish something so far-fetched that it makes us believe that anything is possible.
As someone once said — if you can dream it, you can achieve it. That someone might have been me, but I’m sure I read it.
In Bandwidth former CIA operative Hayden Campbell is right-hand man to one of the world’s wealthiest men and observes the cat and mouse game that ensues as a Dutch student discovers a technology to send voice, video and data through Europe’s municipal water system.
With echoes of how progress in many industries is intentionally hamstrung in pursuit of profit by greedy, monopolistic organisations blindsided by their misapportioned obsession with zero-sum games, here we see shadowy interceptions by all manner of insidious characters intent on consigning to landfill our academic protagonist’s hopes for a better world.
Bandwidth was a total sleeper hit in the UK. That surprises me. Us Brits have a near-unhealthy preoccupation with doomladen prose. That it skirts with reality should only make it more fondly accepted. Or maybe it’s because Morrison has cleverly interwoven stuff we see emerge in news headlines with arcs barely skimming the surface of rational that we’re caught off-guard and unprepared for a tale that really should give us all pause in this technology-swollen age.
What we have here in Bandwidth is a cocktail of distemper, technology, politics, power and a clash of cultures.
Morrison has a tremendous talent for writing so vividly you can paint yourself into the story. Few authors have this knack; he’s not a million miles away from Stephen King in conveying a scene with such accuracy and believability that watching it play out at a cinema wouldn’t enhance the experience.
Your author is a Pulitzer-nominated journalist, and a former senior policy advisor to the US government. I get the feeling that Morrison knows more than he’s letting on. But that only adds to the conspiratorial air lavished upon our senses by Bandwidth.
Bandwidth is available now on Amazon.

