When the Eye Sees Itself: A Bright Future in a Fragmented Mirror

When the Eye Sees Itself is the debut novel of Eric Borgerson. Released in January of 2018, the story attempts to gel Borgerson’s interests and background in law, political activism, philosophy, and spiritual traditions into a single narrative. Conceptually, most of the threads and ideas are compelling and brimming with potential, but in practice the various themes and sub-plots often war with each other for time on the page.

The world of When the Eye is quite similar to our own, but with one important distinction—for the past thousand years, society has been classified and divided into three distinct castes. Those deemed too sensitive and emotionally fragile are classified as Vulnerables and shielded from volatile Aggressives that might exploit or abuse them. Both groups are quarantined into separate ghettoes (or detained in institutions or prisons) where they are denied the full benefits belonging to the majority of true Citizens that fall within an acceptable spectrum of emotional balance. These boundaries are not immutable, as Vulnerables and Aggressives have the option to attempt “therapeutic” reprogramming, or fight for expansion of the legal definitions of Citizenship in the courts.

This legal option for reclassification serves as the novel’s launching point as Leo Baksh, a legal advocate specializing in the classification system, is approached by Anna Dao, a rare Vulnerable with select Aggressive tendencies who wishes to make the legal argument that her warring traits provide a balance that qualifies her for Citizenship. Parallel to this, a group of activist hackers plan a breach of nation’s Department of International Intelligence (read: CIA) in hopes of exposing abuses of government power and flaws in the nature of the classification system. A third thread follows a task force of the Department of Domestic Intelligence (an FBI allegory this time) as they attempt to curb a bizarre new black market of Aggressives recording and distributing their abuses of Vulnerables. The various narratives dance around each other in a web of government conspiracy and political scheming that eventually threatens to tear apart a nation.

At the center of the story is a cutting-edge technology known as Quantum Field Resonance Imaging that allows users to mentally interface with computers and even share minds with each other. This QFRI technology ends up being put to darker uses such as thought manipulation, torture and interrogation, and illegal BDSM scenarios of direct mental abuse where Vulnerable and Aggressive become Submissive and Dominant. It is also the center of most of the book’s spiritual themes such as when—in a novel twist on the Gibsonian console cowboys of early cyberpunk—the collective of hacktivists must become masters of meditation and Zen-like calm before they can hope to dive brain-first into government computer systems and slip through undetected, and also when abuser and victim alike are eventually transformed and redeemed by the sharing of self.

The prose itself is utilitarian almost to a fault, and Borgerson strays a bit too often from the writer’s maxim of “show, don’t tell.” A new character’s perspective is often accompanied by a lengthy infodump of their history and traits while, at certain stretches, the writing takes on an almost journalistic style where events are simply reported with little fanfare. Rather than propel the story forward, this spareness tends to give the story an uneven pacing and sometimes threatens to take the reader out of the narrative.

The overall picture of the world is not a blissful utopia, but the book is otherwise fueled by a dewy-eyed idealism. The characters do endure hardships and horrors in their journey, but ultimately their reactions to the world around them and their ability to challenge and change it for the better are portrayed in such idyllic terms that a reader can practically see the author ticking off a wish-fulfilling list of resolutions to real-world issues. Not that it’s a bad list by any means, but these themes and ideals are presented with a lack of nuance that is more likely to leave the reader feeling preached to from a soapbox rather than intellectually engaged. In fact, the theme of “human interconnection” was so ham-fisted that, as I reached the final chapters, I was struck by the notion that I was reading a self-help book given narrative set within a fictional framework. This is all not to say that positive messages and happy endings are intrinsically naïve or uninteresting, but far too often I found myself rolling my eyes at a particularly saccharine passage.

No more is this evident than with the book’s characters themselves, who are often too sympathetic to be actually interesting. Everyone is just so frustratingly nice – forgiving of others’ flaws, considerate of their feelings and boundaries, charitable towards their characters, and able to see past their hardened facades to each others’ tender cores – that they often simply shuffle around on the pages instead of dynamically bouncing off of each other with real tension. Even the few real villains in the book are moustache-twirlers with largely predictable soft spots that fail to give them much real depth, and their eventual redemption or punishment is equally unsubtle.

The plot ultimately ends up being a bit of a mess as Borgerson tries to cast a reflection of various current events of the past several years, including the rise of the prison-industrial complex, ubiquitous surveillance, and a rather overt Trump allegory to name a few. The dual-natured Anna Dao seems to be the most dynamic and interesting character at first, but she is quickly revealed to be MacGuffin rather than heroine, and even her entire court case becomes a footnote around the halfway mark when the book takes a sixty-page detour as a lead character unceremoniously develops an opioid addiction and spirals into further drug abuse. These left-turns continue to accelerate as main characters are yanked off-camera or otherwise diminish in agency, and background characters step center stage apropos of nothing to take their place. The final effect is akin to trying to wrangle a reptile that keeps leaving you clutching the empty skin it just shed.

Sadly, I can’t say much to recommend When the Eye Sees Itself. The core ideas related to the world’s unique caste-system and the implications of the mind-sharing technology are genuinely interesting, but they become buried beneath other themes and sub-plots, a dizzying array of characters, and sheer word-count that make the book an unwieldy beast that the author loses control of. Perhaps if Borgerson had maintained a narrower focus with this story or saved such a complex and multilayered epic until he developed more experience, it could have been done better justice. In this freshman effort, however, Borgerson’s reach exceeds his grasp.

When the Eye Sees Itself – 5/10

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