The Power of X by Arthur Sellings

It occurred to me that I was being maneuvered into this, as I had been maneuvered into the press conference, but I didn't care.

One of Blondie's first singles was originally titled "Sex Offender," but was released under the title of "X Offender."  So I have been wondering if a similar little sleight of hand might perhaps be going on with Arthur Sellings's 1968 novel The Power of X.  Earlier this year I received a copy of the 1970 Berkley paperback from Joachim Boaz, one of the many books in his large donation to the MPorcius Library.  This will be the ninth book I have read from that generous donation.

The year is 2018!  (In the book, too!)  Our narrator is a London art dealer who owns his own gallery, 34-year-old Max Afford (oh, the Dickensian names.)  This is the future, so people have videophones and Europe is united in a Federation with a President and a Senate and the British Royal family has decamped to the Bahamas.  Equally astounding is that technology has recently been developed that can duplicate anything, and the duplicates are identical to the original, impossible to distinguish from the "master."  The process takes a tremendous amount of energy, so it is not economical to duplicate hamburgers to feed the poor or even gold bars--it is unique items, like art masterpieces and prototypes of high tech devices that must be tested to destruction, that get duplicated.  The government has a monopoly on this technology and by selling the duplication service it makes a big profit, so big that taxes have been reduced!

The whole duplication process that Selling presents to us feels quite contrived.  Even the techs who operate the machine that does the duplicating don't know which of the items that comes out of the machine is the original, because while the doors are closed they move around or something.  Also, each object can only be duplicated nineteen times, and duplicates can't be duplicated, so only a maximum of twenty of any item can exist.  The boffins suggest that our universe is one of many stacked up like sheets of paper and the duplication process reaches into nearby universes to peel off those universes' iterations of the items being duplicated, and that the process can only reach nineteen other universes.

Our hero Max, while handling a Matisse (the start of this book is full of references to famous artists--wikipedia tells us that Sellings himself--real name: Arthur Gordon Ley--was an art dealer as well as an author and government scientist) discovers that he can distinguish between items that have been duplicated and those that have not simply by touching them, and can even tell if the item he is touching is the original or one of the dupes!

Months later, in 2019, Max has the opportunity to shake the hand of the popular President of Europe--when he does so he finds that the Prez is a dupe!

Hardcover first edition

Sellings's writing is smooth, and the first 50 or so pages of the book feel fresh because the idea is sort of new and it isn't every day I read about a dude who works at an art gallery, but then we get page after page of detective/conspiracy bilge.  We've got kidnappings, disguises, messages that have to be memorized and destroyed, people trying to shake tails by getting lost among the crowds at a major intersection, blah blah blah.  And we've got scenes of people sitting around discussing clues, looking through newspaper clippings, that sort of thing.  None of this mystery stuff is exciting or suspenseful because Sellings presents much of it for laughs, and because our narrator Max is not in charge of his own fate, but manipulated by others, primarily his wealthy and pushy aunt, Clarissa, who comes off like an aunt in a Wodehouse story.  There is also her buddy, Guy Burroughs, an oversized politician famous for being flamboyant who wears a pink bow tie and in his first appearance brings flowers--I guess his foppishness (and sexual orientation?) are supposed to be funny (his name is a joke--he is an expert on Africa) but all that flamboyant fop stuff is dropped quickly.

The aunt and the senator and Max, while sitting around, figure out the conspiracy.  I can take a detective story in which, Mickey Spillane style, the P. I. goes from apartment to apartment, seducing women and beating up thugs to find his clues, but a story about a guy relaxing in a restaurant and talking through the clues with his aunt and a clotheshorse politician is a drag.  (My mother and T. S. Eliot may go gaga over Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but I find them almost unreadable.) 

In the final third of the 144-page novel Max and Burroughs sneak into the Presidential Palace (I think it is just the old Buckingham Palace, republicanized) because Burroughs is confident the President has not been killed, just replaced, and is imprisoned in the Palace.  (The point of replacing the Prez derives from the fact that the duplicates are not in fact identical to the original--duplicate living things are "confused, easily cowed, and lack initiative," so the dupe President is easily manipulated by a secret cabal.)  To accomplish this mission the art dealer and the senator disguise themselves as members of the working class* and use a "brontium-headed atomic boring machine" to dig a tunnel from a vacant building nearby to the bomb shelter under the palace--Burroughs assumes the Prez is imprisoned in the shelter.  And he is right!  Max and Burroughs liberate the real Prez and capture a member of the cabal.

*If I was being paid to say good things about The Power of X (and when I worked for the government I did actually write things I didn't believe for money) I would say the novel is about identity. 

The English dropped yet another bomb
on the Fatherland when The Power of X
was translated into German in 1972

In the last 20 pages of the novel the President disappears from a sealed room, and Selling inflicts upon us one of the standard forms of mystery fiction--the locked room mystery!  Burroughs even says, "I've heard of locked room mysteries, but this beats all of them!"  (Remember when we read that Fredric Brown locked room mystery about a ghoulish armadillo?)  Then Max and Burroughs and the rest watch a government broadcast on TV--the duplicate President starts giving a speech, and then disappears.  It turns out that the duplicates are not from other universes, but from future periods of time, and so only last a certain period of time (too boring to explain here.)  This deus ex machina resolution of the plot renders all the drama of the rescue of the president, and everything else in the book, pointless--even if Max and Burroughs had done nothing to oppose them, the cabal would have been foiled by the disappearance of the President and his dupe.

The Power of X is not good, and it is not good in many ways, from the total lack of human drama and human feeling, the overuse of boring mystery fiction cliches and absolutely unfunny jokes, to the fact that the hero is just a puppet and the plot is resolved by something outside the control of any character.

Bad!  (At least we've got that great Lehr cover!)