A review of Solomon the Peacemaker

It's a dystopian future, but not as we know it, in Hunter Welles' fascinating first-person confession Solomon the Peacemaker. In the opening pages, we meet V, currently being held in a Guantanamo-style black site and under questioning for his part in some terrorist act we know nothing about. From the mouth of this very unreliable and emotionally compromised narrator, we get the lengthy confession of a man who has allowed outside influences and loves to inflate his previously strictly cerebral principles and make him do something about them in real life.

Although I've called this a dystopian future novel myself, in a way what Solomon the Peacemaker describes is just a future, with good points and bad points, poor people and rich people and all the other dichotomies you more or less see today. The biggest change for Welles' future is the growing presence of robots in everyday life and people's response to them. Emotions run particularly high when it comes to the Peacemaker, a computer system that has been keeping nations from warring with each other for 50 years. Disputes go to the Peacemaker and everyone agrees to abide by its decisions, a situation that naturally leads to a lot of festering resentment.

On top of those groups and nations that feel hard done by, there's an important ethical consideration in that a single human being is required to be hooked up to the machine at all times so that it can make decisions with reference to human emotions and memories. Unfortunately, the dubious recipient of this honour, who is only supposed to serve the Peacemaker for five years, frequently fails to survive the undocking.

Threaded through the story of the Peacemaker is the story of V, whose love-life is a particularly difficult one, and the voice of V, which is highly questionable. Are the authorities lying to the people about robots and the Peacemaker? Or is V lying to his confessor or to himself? By his own admission, V joined a cult - not the most stable of environments - and has also dabbled in drugs that cause memory loss, unfolding a multitude of possibilities about what the real "truth" could be.

Welles has crafted a thoroughly engrossing mystery with the twists and turns in V's tale and in V himself, a hugely flawed and intriguing character who combines a towering ego and selfish nature with a tender sense of responsibility to his world and the people in it.

Solomon the Peacemaker comes out on January 14 in the UK and the US.