Adam Roberts can be relied upon to never be predictable in his choice of subject matter: his previous two novels were a sequel to Gulliver’s Travels and a tale of alien invasion and cover up in the Soviet Union. With New Model Army, he turns his attention to the profound effects that modern Internet technology could have on the fate of nations and the future of warfare. New Model Armies are a 21st century Western phenomenon – democratically organised groups of soliders, thousands strong, whose use of GPS and wikis and crowdsourcing, plus an adherence to a pure form of democracy, make them hugely difficult for conventional hierarchical armies to counter – there is no head to cut off, no officers to target, decisions are made and ratified on the fly, and in advance or retreat everyone makes their own way to an objective. Given the level of technology embodied by iPhones and the like right now, there is nothing remotely implausible about Roberts’ conjectures (who knows, Google or Apple could be quietly stockpiling weapons as I write!).

The New Model Army at the heart of this book, Pantegral, has been hired by the newly independent Scotland to force England to come to terms (as with the term New Model Army, originally used of the Parliamentary forces under Cromwell, this seems designed to evoke Britain’s last experience of genuine civil war). This results in actions such as the Battle of Basingstoke and the deployment of a tactical nuclear weapon at Hampton Court Palace as Pantegral wins a series of victories in the Home Counties, baffling the British Army, which can’t evolve effective tactics for an army that is so tactically flexible and whose only strategic objective is not to get forced in to an open battle and beaten.

Our narrator, Tony, is no more or less than one soldier within Pantegral. It transpires that he is telling his story as part of his debriefing by the American military, who have been forced to intervene in Europe when it becomes clear that New Model Armies are a threat that won’t be easily defeated. We hear about the death of a civilian that has haunted him since he witnessed it, the deaths of close comrades, his part in key battles and how he came to end up in American custody. Apparently so successful is Tony’s deprogramming that he is being sent to Europe to be used as some kind of weapon against an NMA that is smashing up Strasbourg. It seems, at the close, that the results were not quite what the Americans expected…

Were it to be published by a general fiction imprint, with a slightly more abstract cover, and marketed to people who read literary novels, it is no stretch at all to imagine New Model Army being taken very seriously indeed as a piece of literary dystopia, on a par with Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (it’s actually better) or the speculative work of Margaret Atwood. The writing is of a very high standard indeed, there is no more technology or combat than there has to be for the needs of a very powerful and well told story – so in all seriousness, I join Kim Stanley Robinson in saying that Adam Roberts should be winning a Booker Prize – though sad to say, it may require imagination even greater than Adam Roberts possesses to visualise that happening. Whatever your literary poison, this book comes highly recommended.

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