Read the opening of John Hunt’s new novel 𝘈𝘭𝘭 𝘎𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘰𝘥.
It’s beautiful. Translucent even. You have the wash of a full moon falling over the yellow flare of the streetlights, bent like metal walking sticks. The trees are planted equidistant. The shadows of their politely trimmed canopies elongate as the camera flies over. A cat looks up, decides to play it safe and saunters into a hedge. There are no cars parked on the street. Each home has a double garage.
The drone decides to check on a treehouse. The plastic crockery and cutlery are neatly set on a small wooden table. The doll, with raised pink cup, stares back at the lens. Her brown marbled eyes don’t blink, her vast eyelashes stay motionless. Her mountain of blonde hair is held in place by a white sweatband. The camera withdraws from the closeup.
‘Protocol demands a double sweep of the block. The gimbal moves higher. All the roads, vertical and horizontal, are still bathed in gold. The suburb is trapped in a gilded cage.’
Protocol demands a double sweep of the block. The gimbal moves higher. All the roads, vertical and horizontal, are still bathed in gold. The suburb is trapped in a gilded cage. The operator goes lower again and switches on the thermal imaging. He waits for heat to create visible images, to depict the spatial distribution of temperature differences. It can be voyeuristic. The red and yellow light bouncing against each other. Reflected energy, coupled. But it’s three o’clock in the morning and all that thermography reveals is a man opening a fridge door and a woman staring at the sky, crying.
Suddenly silver streaks fill the viewfinder. Tracer bullets shoot left and right. Radios crackle. Everything halts. At a hundred feet, context is restored. The garden sprinkler system now loops in lazy circles. Slugs of water smack the climbing wisteria and knock it against the wooden trellising. The latticework bounces off the wall, forced to find its own heartbeat. The concrete fairy, holding a bowl of pansies, cannot release her hands to wipe her dripping nose.
Approach reinitiated.
The camera now hovers above the three black vehicles as they turn into the final corner. The moon pinpoints the rolling roofs in a long splash of light. They travel silently and slowly. Precision more important than speed. They stop outside number fourteen. It is confirmed that a bicycle lying on its side on the lawn is nothing more than a bicycle lying on its side on the lawn. Likewise, the metal barbeque, covered in a grey tarpaulin, is deemed non-threatening.
The lead officer opens his door and climbs out. He tests his boots by transferring his weight left to right and feels reassured by the thick soles. He lifts his visor and looks up. The god he is acknowledging has eight individual rotors and a cluster of cameras wrapped behind a transparent dome. The operator returns the salute by tilting his machine at an acute angle before it disappears into the sky. The officer lets out a long breath.
About John Hunt’s All Good in the Hood
With datafication and surveillance now embedded into our daily lives 24/7, the question has to be who is in charge of this information and what is being done with it. Will we reach a time where the value of a human being will be based entirely on the sum of the data they emit?
All Good in the Hood is a satire that speaks to this new reality. The novel tells the story of Major Thom, an employee responsible for a similar surveillance system, who overnight finds himself on the other end of the lens. He’s incarcerated and interrogated by the very system he helped create, his family forced to endure the protocols of scrutiny he developed.
Major Thom might not be able to break down his cell door, but his sense of humour and imagination may open a window.
