Future Tense

By Melvin Maddocks

THE CALL GIRLS

by ARTHUR KOESTLER

167 pages. Random House. $5.95.

In Darkness at Noon (1941), one of the best political novels of the 20th century, Arthur Koestler dramatized the tragedy of men and women trapped by a megastate that they had helped create--Stalinist Russia. In The Call Girls, Koestler's first novel in 21 years, he dramatizes the tragicomedy of men and women trapped, not by a political revolution but by a knowledge revolution.

In an Alpine village, where English schoolteachers ski away from it all, Koestler assembles a mini-think tank to discuss "Approaches to Survival." The conference table is headed, appropriately, by a nuclear physicist. Around him sit an M.I.T. answer man with his cool dream of "computerizing the future," a biologist with a notion of dropping "antihostility agents" into the world's drinking water, a child psychologist half-convinced that "the answers to man's predicament would emerge literally from the cradle," a social engineer fitting the future into a box by B.F. Skinner and a neurosurgeon preaching the implantation of pacifying electrodes in the brain.

Here are all the salvationists of the Brave New World, proclaiming Apocalypse, then peddling their confusions as Strangelove panaceas. "We are a horrible race, living in horrible times," says one. "Perhaps we should have the courage to think of horrible remedies."

For almost two decades Koestler has been free associating along the frontiers of psychology (most recently, The Roots of Coincidence) and biology (most recently, The Case of the Midwife Toad). But in The Call Girls he hints that his fellow knowledge revolutionaries could be the newest abusers of power--the self-appointed solvers of the future, to whom politicians turn like "babies crying for their nanny."

Koestler's "call girls," summoned here and there by this university and that foundation to perform their expert tricks, are the butts of some chilling satire. A futurology symposium in Stockholm, an ecology conference in Mexico City--it's all the same to these pros of the circuit. The neat, well-organized briefcases open, the neat brochures for doomsday slide out. A little interdisciplinary dialogue: Can cybernetics and alpha waves mix? Is aggressiveness a "primary instinct" or a "stress reaction?" Then on to the cocktail party and the next round table.

What saves the book from being just a bitter scenario is the presence of a young monk, Brother Tony, and a battered old homosexual poet, Sir Evelyn Blood. Both stand for the brave old world of God and art, a world that Koestler feels is fading before the prophets of technology. He despairs of that future but can foresee no other. About the best he can do is try to humanize the crisis mongering of his "call girls" by insisting that "a warning must be life-affirming."

--Melvin Maddocks

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