It’s hard to believe The Singer’s Gun came out twelve years ago. The second novel by Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel, its examination of the complex morality of immigration fraud feels like a response to the increasingly xenophobic attitudes we’re seeing across the West right now: the arbitrary detention of EU nationals at UK airports; the illegal pushbacks of refugee boats in the Mediterranean; the rise in hate crimes committed against Asian-American people in the US. It’s a sobering reminder that these problems are years, maybe decades, in the making.
Anton Waker has grown up among criminals: his parents run an antiques warehouse selling stolen goods, and he himself has been involved in supplying forged American passports and green cards to illegal aliens. Now, he’s cleaned up his act somewhat, having got himself a well-paying office job off the back of a forged diploma from Harvard. That all changes, though, when after a routine background check his secretary disappears and he’s moved to a shabby office on an abandoned floor without explanation. The jig, it would seem, is up for Anton. Needing to leave the country in a hurry, he agrees to do one last job for Aria in return for leaving the family business altogether.
Mandel has a talent for writing flawed characters with grace and compassion. Anton has made some bad decisions off his own back, but the text makes clear that pressure from loving parents and a familial culture of mistrust in social institutions like universities and corporate culture have made it extremely difficult for him to leave corruption behind. The sympathy this generates for Anton allows Mandel to open up a conversation about the ethics of his criminal past with Aria. He considers immigration fraud a victimless crime, even a noble one, giving desperate people a chance at a better life in the States. But the government investigator looking into Aria’s activities reminds him – and us – that it’s not just about forging passports: the darker side of immigration crime involves human trafficking, here specifically focalised through the case of a shipping container full of dead girls, abandoned by the criminals who transported them to America to exploit them.
The investigator’s point is that it’s a slippery slope from forging green cards to human trafficking. But, through Anton’s perspective, the text is also questioning the attitude to immigration that makes such crimes possible in the first place. (Anton’s family are, if I’m not misremembering, immigrants themselves; that’s at the root of their distrust for the government, and part of what humanises them.) For all that this is a novel about murder, blackmail and organised crime, it’s a surprisingly compassionate and gentle read, its very gentleness allowing it to ask some probing and startlingly relevant questions. I’ll definitely be seeking out more of Mandel’s work.
The English Student 