Paul Di Filippo Reviews The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow

The Bezzle, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1250865878, $27.99, hc, 240pp) February 2024.

Cory Doctorow is certainly experiencing a “hot hand” run. That sports phenomenon, where one success impels and invites a subsequent triumph, sometimes in a long streak, can be seen in Doctorow’s two most recent books, which have appeared practically back to back. In November of 2023 came The Lost Cause (reviewed by me for this very publication), which showed the SF genre exactly how to craft a truly engaged near-future novel—dealing with matters of gravitas such as climate change and authoritarianism—with a light touch that did not preclude moral and even educational heft. An immersive and compelling slice of future quotidianness.

Now, just a few months later, we get The Bezzle, the second in a series that began in April of last year (two Doctorow novels in 2023!) with Red Team Blues. This prequel—we are once more in the narrative hands of Marty Hench, forensic accountant—takes place “from decades before that [cryptocurrency] business. This is from the Mesozoic era, the second great era of high-tech scams. Yes, I mean the dot-com bubble.” Cryptocurrency, natch, was the Macguffin at the center of Red Team Blues. At the end of that volume, Hench was left a very rich and safely established fellow, and such conditions do not necessarily conduce to more edge-of-your-seat adventures. So Doctorow harks back to Hench’s less-secure, less-knowing, younger man times, and the strategy pays off.

At this point, I feel as if I should just steer the reader to this review to my aforementioned piece, wherein I categorized all the virtues of Red Team Blues, which are nicely replicated in this new one. High-tech shennanigans; exotic and believable characters; a spotlight on both the downtrodden and the elite; suspense and humor. But the new book has a distinct feel of its own, a slightly different slant on Hench and his profession, producing some revelations that maybe go towards defining the wiser veteran he later became. And while the game at the heart of the plot seems to be played for smaller stakes than the game in Red Team Blues, it paradoxically delivers even more of a moral and ethical punch that its predecessor.  Also, prospective readers might like to learn exactly what the engine of the tale looks like. So, off we go!

The book starts out innocuously enough, as a kind of “buddy flick.” We know Hench already (newbies get a succinct capsule rundown on him), and then we are introduced to his pal Scott Warms. Warms has become a millionaire thanks to some bizarre dot-com folderol, but is legally prohibited from being productive and useful for a period. So he decides to have a good time, taking his less-well-off pal Marty Hench along. The pair spend many weekends on Catalina Island, in the resort town of Avalon, hob-nobbing with other rich folks. And soon they run afoul of avaricious, amoral millionaire Lionel Coleman Jr. It turns out that Coleman is running a pyramid scheme among the island natives—hardworking blue-collar souls who can ill afford to lose all their savings. He’s doing it not so much for profit, as for kicks, a particularly reprehensible attitude. When Warms and Hench discover this, they decide to take Junior down, using Hench’s skills. They succeed, and thus ends Part One.

But this is the worst thing that could have happened to them. They have earned Junior’s undying enmity, and this villain’s hatred and machinations will contour the rest of the book.

There’s a quiet spell in the lives of the two men after this, but then Warms ends up in real trouble with the authorities—trouble that is partly his fault, and partly exacerbated by Junior, who is pulling some strings for revenge. Warms ends up in a bad prison situation. Hench, looking to help his buddy, soon finds his own life going south, as he is stalked, beaten, financially assailed, and otherwise maligned. Once again, as in Red Team Blues, his eventual triumph depends on a network of helpers and fellow travelers. A lovely call girl named Katya; a lawyer named Benny Caetani; and a government auditor named Hassan Aziz. In a group effort, they bring down Coleman at last, and improve Warms’s living conditions. (Flavors of Christopher Brown’s excellent Tropic of Kansas series are a relevant benchmark.)

But here’s where moral complexities arise, in a stinging reveal. Hench has been so focused on his buddy, he neglected Warms’s larger wishes to secure systemic changes in the prison complex. So, in a last-minute twist, Warms takes over, gets what he’s after, but only at great cost to himself, leaving Hench feeling that he let his friend down in the end. Victory is bittersweet.

Such shifting valences of doing good and doing bad, self-centeredness versus larger altruism, make this tale resonate along different vectors than the more black-and-white issues and outcomes of Red Team Blues. And the smaller scale, one-on-one antagonisms and friendships seem more powerful in their way than the global issues of the predecessor book.

Robert Heinlein was always known—and always came across in his writings—as The Man Who Knew How the World Worked. Doctorow delivers the same sense of putting yourself in the hands of a fellow who has peered behind Oz’s curtain. When he fills you in lucidly about some arcane bit of economics or computer tech or social media scam, you feel, first, that you understand it completely and, second, that you can trust Doctorow’s analysis and insights. That makes for a great reading experience.

The title of the book is explained thus:

The word comes from ‘embezzlement,’ which Galbraith called ‘the most interesting crime.’ He had a way with words, and his definition of the bezzle was so great I memorized it. It’s the ‘weeks, months, or years’ that ‘elapse between the com- mission of the crime and its discovery. This is the period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.’

Like Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, The Bezzle takes the reader behind the scenes of such insidious manufactured catastrophes, and anatomizes their wickedness for our bemused wonderment.

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