Customer Reviews

The Fear Index

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I am a big, big fan of Robert Harris. I found his book Enigma when my interest in the code breaking of Bletchley Park in WW2 was at its peak; that mix of fact and fiction blew me away and it remains his best book in my mind. On a par with it there is Fatherland, the alternative history classic, and almost level, Pompeii. Archangel is also not to be missed.

So, when I started The Fear Index, I was positively titillated with anticipation - a new Harris is always good news.

Within 50 pages, my enthusiasm was dampened somewhat, and after 150 pages, I was downright disappointed. This tale of a brilliant physicist who leaves CERN to write the best algorithmic investment system ever seen was just not what I have always liked best in Harris.

In my mind, Harris shines when he tells the tale of the single man, cast in a role by chance and personal talent, conquering insurmountable odds. Tom Jericho in Enigma, Xavier March in Fatherland, and Fluke Kelso in Archangel have all been set in a situation where only their personal integrity and hard work will win the day.

Not so in The Fear Index. Harris writes well as always, but the picture he draws of Alex Hoffmann has none of the usual charm of a Harris hero. Hoffmann is arrogant, talented, and definitely the man for the job, but his almost autistic lack of interaction doesn't endear him to the reader. Alex's relationship with his artist wife Gabrielle is superficial and uninteresting, even if the culmination point of that relationship in the art gallery raises eyebrows in the best tradition of Harris' books.

Another thing that worried me much was that Harris ventures into Clancyist methods of adding technobabble to add excitement. I was especially disappointed with the small things that he's always done really well: risking that I will be called a muppet by some people, I'll say that CPUs do not hum - transformers do, and there are no files in a computer's registry. Such small items become more and more evident towards the end of the book.

And the crucial element of any book of this type, namely suspension of disbelief, just didn't go far enough. I will not disclose the plot, but at 2/3 of the book it fell flat for me and I read the rest merely to see what happens, not on the edge of the seat enjoying every moment of it.

I will repeat that he writes just as well as ever (with a few somewhat tired similes, a first for me in his books), and to some people, especially in the world of finance, this may be more interesting than to the average lay person, but my expectations were not met, and I will remain in wait for his next book to see if he goes back to creating a truly interesting character in a complex and dangerous situation.

I thought this was an very well-written page turner with a believable plot. It focuses on a hedge fund manager that uses an artificial intelligence application to gain an insurmountable competitive edge in the market, but then things quickly get out of control.

Robert Harris has some genuine expertise in this area because of his previous book "Enigma", which gave a very realistic account of how the British broke the Nazi code in World War II. That book included an accurate historical account on Alan Turing's work, and he was really the father of modern computer science and developer of the "turing test" for artificial intelligence.

Harris's familiarity with the subject matter comes through in this book. One of the biggest complaints that I usually have about books like this is that the dialog is corny or contrived, or the plot is unrealistic. That happens when authors don't really understand their subject matter or what people who work in a technical field are really like. Harris offers up realistic dialog and narrative that seems natural and believable, even if the characters are not necessarily deeply developed.

Overall, this is a fun and informative read. It's a good way to get some familiarity with artificial intelligence and the issues it will bring. Keep in mind that AI is NOT fiction ... this is really happening and is going to have a BIG impact in lots of areas of our lives, not just Wall Street but also jobs and employment.

If you're interested in this subject, a great (and very readable) NON-FICTION book is The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future, which talks about how artificial intelligence, robotics, etc is going to affect the real world job market and economy within the next 10 years or so.

There are spoilers in this review.

This is the third Harris book I've read. Fatherland and Archangel were really fun reads that had fresh and interesting story lines. I can't say the same for this one.

This book took longer than usual to read. Not because it is difficult or long, but because I'd keep putting it down and swearing not to pick it up again. But I did, and persevered until the end. I can sum up my disappointment in this book as happening in three phases.

Phase one: The first section of the book was irritating in the extreme. The author spends most of his time describing the obscenely rich house of the protagonist. For example, he doesn't just look at the clock to check the time, instead he glances at the Louis Quinze clock on the mantlepiece. And this after a near death experience. Yeah, so I get it- he's a billionaire. And over and over and over again. He's a billionaire. And he's hot. And the most brilliant man alive. And he's developing the ultimate self-developing (evolving) algorithm. And his wife is hot. And she makes hot art. But she's sad, too, because she can't have children (I guess this "factoid" was supposed to be enough to give the characters and their marriage depth).

Yawn.

Phase two: So, I left the book on the nightstand for two weeks and read other stuff. In a moment of weakness I took it and started reading again. As the perspective changed-- to the investigator-- the book was much less insufferable, and I realized the author was trying to make some point about wealth (heavy handed and uninteresting in my view). The book then began to move along quite nicely, with a bit of a mystery and quick pacing. Although the obtuseness of the main character did get on my nerves every so often I was fine with that as long as the action progressed. I started to guess who was tormenting the lead character with mystery books, hired killers/perverts, secret cameras/ et cetera not because I'm so damn smart, but because there was only development of the story in one direction. The protagonist had no enemies simply because he was so lackluster (in spite of being a hot, brilliant, billionaire). The only one interested in tormenting him HAD to be his brilliant evolving hedge fund algorithm.

Which leads to Phase Three: (more spoilers)

The super intelligent and free-ranging computer program. Yep, the algorithm evolved, alright. It took over his bank accounts, sent him rare books, built a super computer in a warehouse across town, spied on him through cameras it had installed all over his office and house. Yet... it still wasn't smart enough (evolved enough) to see him coming at his monster CPU with 5 cans of gas and a blow torch.

I just feel dumb even summarizing this plot line. It wasn't unique, and it wasn't even done amusingly. There are similar "evil awarenesses" who invade the internet and gather intelligence in (highly improbable) ways in episodes of both Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. And those were done over a decade ago and much more convincingly.

Don't waste your time on this book.

This is a very topical thriller based around the current economic depression and its beginnings. The plot throws a different twist on Artificial Intelligence getting out of hand and plays on the human fear of computers taking over, as well as the AI using THE FEAR INDEX to determine where to invest. The book revolves around the main character Dr Alex Hoffman, a physicist who sets up a hedge fund which, using his self-learning programme, earns him a vast fortune. Strange things start to happen and Alex realises he is not as fully in control of his life as he thought and begins to doubt himself and events. The writing is good, the descriptions and dialogue spot on.

Where the book let me down was in the somewhat stereotypical characters and lack of their development, the hedge fund investors are all self-involved geeks and the policeman predictable. The Darwin analogy, although interesting, seemed to fizzle out and not reach its full potential, much like the novel.

Don't get me wrong, this is a good book and I enjoyed reading it, but it could have been so much more!

Robert Harris is among the best in the world at writing historical fiction and alternate histories and filling them with tension and suspense, and I am excited anytime he comes out with a new book. But I can't help but feel that the success of the film based upon Harris' The Ghost a/k/a The Ghost Writer has had a negative influence on Harris' writing. The Fear Index feels like nothing so much as an interesting idea for a movie, which Harris couldn't write directly for the screen because it's not his oeuvre. And let's face it -- any novelist would find it a challenge to write a thriller based on hedge fun trading, although to Harris' credit, he manages to make that a lot more fun than it sounds.

The set-up for the story is great: uber techno-geek turned billionaire hedge-fund manager gets banged up in a creepy home invasion the night before a big presentation to a group of wealthy investors about his company's algorithmic trading program. Convinced the intruder is trying to mess with his head, he begins to unravel, even as his company stands on the brink of unprecedented success. Harris brilliantly ties Darwin's theory of evolution and survival of the fittest to the world's financial markets, drawing parallels to social psychology and the so-called "fear index," that is the market's volatility.

To say much more about the plot I'd have to include spoilers, so I'll just say that the resolution of the mystery is far less satisfying than the first half, requiring the protagonist to do things that don't ring true, even for a man who may be suffering a break-down, and scenic details that will doubtless look good when this gets made into a film, but which really make no sense (sorry for being vague here, but pointing out the glaring lapses in logic would involve revealing spoilers). Suffice it to say that the ending is rather predictable, bogged down moreover, with acronyms and such "I'm smarter than you are" terms as "buy-side liquidity" and "nine-halves trade now", which Harris doesn't bother to explain, realizing, perhaps, that continuing to explain the workings of the market would interfere with the action of the denouement. Even the writing lacks Harris' usual eloquence, with clunky transitions, jarring shifts between tenses, and grammatical errors, which I can only imagine are the result of Harris rushing to get this done while the events signalling the beginning of the world's current economic crisis are still fresh in people's minds.

Harris fans and market junkies are likely to be entertained, if not enthralled. Those new to Harris would be advised to start with one of his earlier and far more satisfying works.

A novel is a thing unto itself. A movie script is a stepping stone, a technical blueprint. Without having read any other Robert Harris books, I have no basis for comparison -- but this one, while quite readable (if one has some basic understanding of world markets), is a movie script masquerading as a novel. The eventual film producers -- and there will be film producers -- may have Tom Stoppard cut it down and polish it up. But they will save themselves time and money by giving the book to a film student with a word processor, who can do a fluff-ectomy and reformat what's left into a shooting script complete with a nice role for Jean Reno. There are endless descriptions of things we don't need to know; historical-background ramblings that are well-written, but still quite tedious. Lop out the obvious filler, write "FADE IN" at the beginning and "FADE OUT" at the end, keep the taut, realistic dialogue, keep the vivid scene descriptions, the (all too occasional) energetic pacing and...voilá! Roll cameras!
All that said, despite an important howler about the way email systems work and a couple of conveniently stupid characters who ought to know better, this is a highly readable book for anyone who "gets" arbitrage in the computer age. The movie will be better, because that's what "Fear Index" was in the first place.

Little did I expect another version of "HAL" (2001, A Space Odyssey), cramped to fit the interests/concerns about the impact of hedge funds. The plot development is formulaic, the characters undeveloped, and the ending entirely predictable.
Like the hedge funds this was written to make money....clients, readers be damned.

Robert Harris' Enigma is a masterpiece. Ghostwriter got a bit tangled up in recent politics. For the Fear Index, Harris went on a quick trip around CERN and dashed off some Dan Brown junk fiction, as if we hadn't already had enough.

After reading the well-crafted and engaging book Enigma by Robert Harris, I expected something similar from the Fear Index. Quite the contrary. I found the plot contrived, the characters poorly developed, the themes stereotypical. Like another reviewer, I started and stopped this book several times, hoping for the best. It was not forthcoming. This is not the same writer who created Enigma. (Actually, could this have been ghost written by someone else?)

I am a huge Robert Harris fan, but i have to say this was for me his most disappointing book so far. It's hard to describe why it's so disappointing without spoilering the story, but after about a quarter of the book I started to worry that the author surely wouldn't just be reusing a hackneyed, done-to-death sci-fi plot that's been around since the 60's. But by half way through it was almost impossible to deny that that was where the story was going.

I have actually launched (an unsuccessful) quantitative hedge fund previously and his research on the ins and outs of quant hedge funds, their activities and their characters felt very authentic. He did his research well there. Unfortunately his research into artificial intelligence, another central theme of the book, seems to have come straight from watching 1970's reruns of The Outer Limits.

As with all of Harris's books the writing is tight and engrossing, and it is an easy book to read in a day or two without putting down. But unlike many of his other books which are creative and original, as well as meticulously researched, this one is slow, unoriginal and predictable. As the master writer he is, it is still a very good read, but don't expect another Lustrum, Enigma or Pompei.