What I Am Reading: "Q" by Luther Blissett
This is actually the second (but not the final) book to cross my desk because of Gizmodo’s article about Ong’s Hat, a manufactured urban legend that ended up growing into a famous conspiracy theory. This book (which is a historical fiction/thriller set in the Reformation, but we’ll get to that eventually) is networked into the same universe of conspiracy theories and alternate reality games at several points. The primary link is that it is the product of a “culture jamming” project by some European artists and intellectuals in the ‘90s. Secondarily, there is a suspicion that it has given at least some level of inspiration to the odious QAnon conspiracy theory that some see as an ARG gotten out of hand, or as an elaborate prank of its own.
Luther Blissett does not actually exist. The name originated as the official signature of a group of Italian activists who spent the ‘90s and early 2000s engaging in “culture jamming,” layered hoaxes intended to introduce an element of unreality into the media environment and art world. It would eventually find widespread use as an activist pseudonym, sort of like a less-toxic John Galt intended to be a “folk hero of the information society.” Regarding the original Italian group, however, the ArtNet article I have linked to before states,
In an essay on the history of the Luther Blissett Project, Northeastern University’s Marco Deseriis theorizes their method as a form of “media homeopathy”: “The idea was to inject into the media bloodstream stories whose patent falsity would eventually induce the media immune system into a reaction of its own.”
Some think that the QAnon conspiracy theory, which centers around the idea that President Trump is fighting a secret war against a global cabal of child traffickers, is a similar effort to prank the right-wing media ecosystem. If it is, we are still within the grip of the fever, and the media’s immune system has only declined in recent years. The possibility of the explicit association or inspiration stems, obviously, from the title, and from the theme of secretive governmental manipulation and conspiracies.
The novel itself was written by four Bologna-based members of the art collective: Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Fredrico Guglielmi, and Luca Di Meo. They would later re-form under the pen name of Wu Ming, and are continuing to write to the present day. Q (or Qoèlet), the eponymous character, is a papal agent. Set in the first half of the sixteenth century, it centers around a man whose birth name is never given, who participates in a series of religious wars of the time. He starts as an acolyte of Thomas Müntzer during the German Peasant’s Rebellion, when the radical Anabaptists rose against both the Lutherans and the Catholics, espousing a less hierarchical and more democratically empowering theology (and, according to the narrator, attempting to combat greater social injustices). This rebellion was crushed, and the main character spends the next decade licking his wounds. He later becomes embedded in the Siege of Münster in 1534-35, where the city of Münster was seized by Anabaptists and, under a series of decreasingly sensible leaders, fell into carnivalesque chaos and was retaken by establishment forces.
The first half of the novel consists of the main character recounting the tale up until that point to the leader of a commune in Antwerp. He eventually deduces that these failures appear to have been due to the provocations of an enemy agent, Q, who managed each time to incite the Anabaptists to overreach and bring about their own ruin. The second half then shifts to more of a espionage thriller, as the protagonist moves from working to defraud a large Dutch-Habsburg banking clan to setting up a network of book-dealers out of Venice. This effort spreads tracts that propagandize reconciliation between Protestants and the Church (and thus a lessening of powers for the inquisition). As he comes into a clearer understanding of the agent Q’s activities against the Anabaptists and against his Antwerp commune, he works to lay a trap to draw this agent out into the open, and comes to be driven by revenge instead of by religious zeal.
Despite its ‘90s countercultural pedigree, the book is a fairly straightforward historical thriller. It had a faint element of Umberto Eco, perhaps just in the Italian origin and the late medieval setting. Many chapters are made up of Q’s letters to his boss, Cardinal Gianpietro Carafa, spymaster and arch-reactionary. This sometimes makes it seem that the reader is being fed exposition, but this is perhaps necessary for a story that spans an eventful 25 years in European history. Maybe it’s just because I’m an old pro at this by now, but I didn’t have any trouble understanding the theological complaints of the Anabaptists, or Cardinal Carafa’s decades-long balancing efforts against the Habsburg Emperor. This could mean that the plot background is delivered simply, or it could just mean that history is being streamlined a bit. I was also happy to read more about the German Peasants’ Rebellion and the Münster uprising, which I actually only heard of somewhat recently when it was a background element in a horror novel (Adam Nevill’s Last Days). Anyway, if I somehow hadn’t known about the Luther Blissett situation, this would have struck me as a normal, if ambitious, historical novel.