"Views" - After "Kangaroo Chronicles": This is Marc-Uwe Kling's first thriller
A sixteen-year-old teenage girl disappears and appears in a brutal Internet video. The perpetrators are masked. Right-wing groups are on the move, seeking revenge. Left and Right clash on the streets, and grenades fly through the air soon. The social media fan the flames and there are unexpected things that emerge from the digital world... Just as the author here attempts to cast current political debates in novel form, it sends a chill: What can one still believe in, what not? Do we always have to be prepared for the worst?
Marc-Uwe Kling is best known for the "Kangaroo Chronicles". The satirical stories about an anarchist kangaroo living with an unsuccessful musician were so popular that they made it to the cinema, with Kling writing the screenplays. He also came up with a children's musical about a rebellious mythical creature named "No-horn" and a fantasy book, on which his twin daughters also collaborated. So far, Kling has been known for silliness and humor. But now, for the first time, he tries his hand at crime writing. It's only moderately successful.
Marc-Uwe Kling talks about wits and liver sausage sandwiches
What the publisher markets as a "thriller" and labels with a trigger warning ("Sensitive Content") on the cover is no more thrilling than an ordinary Sunday crime scene. The cast is similarly motley: A tough commissioner with a migration background meets a pompous Ossi colleague, who makes politically incorrect jokes as often as he inhales liver sausage sandwiches. Kling's frequent insertion of witty one-liners doesn't quite fit with the sometimes brutal events in his story. However, "Views" is better written than any Fitzek.
The author has done his homework, explaining in detail what "Deepfakes" are and what abbreviations like AFIS and IDKO stand for (look it up yourself). Due to the many explanatory passages, "Views" reads more like a crime novel disguised as a technical manual on innovations and police work. On the other hand, scenes of police work, such as BKA employees staring at a screen like a horde of fools ("Most in the team seemed not to have known how far the technology had come"), are not very authentic.
In the last third of the book, the story gains momentum, and there are a few surprises. However, the final scenes read as if Kling wanted to make amends to the genre he had initially intended to experiment with, by force.
The novel by Marc-Uwe Kling, titled "Views," which some categorize as a thriller, includes a reference to artificial intelligence with its discussion of Deepfakes. Despite the technical jargon, the story doesn't fully deliver the promised thrills, with the commissioner's frequent consumption of liver sausage sandwiches and the author's inclusion of humorous one-liners.
Some readers might find the detailed explanations of technology and police work in "Views" to be out of place, making the book feel more like a manual than a thriller. However, towards the end, the pace picks up, and the novel shows signs of Kling's attempt to reconcile his distinctive style with the crime genre.
The digital world, an integral part of the novel, serves as a platform for unexpected developments, much like how social media can amplify real-world events. This juxtaposition between the physical and virtual worlds is a theme that resonates with the broader societal debate on the impact of technology in our daily lives, as explored in the given text.
