Book review: Patrick Flanery’s I Am No One is a beautifully written slow-motion thriller

Patrick Flanery novel reads like a collaboration between John le Carre and Franz Kafka.

I Am No One by Patrick Flanery. Tim Duggan Books via AP Photo

Why would anyone want to spy on Jeremy O’Keefe? After all, he tells the reader, “I am no one,” just a history professor who recently returned to America after a decade spent teaching in England. Yet Jeremy can’t shake the feeling that he’s being watched.

First, his computer is hacked. Then he spots a man in a ski mask standing outside his apartment, staring at his window. Next, he receives a series of parcels filled with printed records of every website he has visited, every email he has sent, every phone call he has made.

Jeremy doesn’t know whether the parcels are a threat or a warning – but someone, it seems, has taken an unnatural interest in him. Or, maybe, as family members suggest, he is suffering from a paranoid delusion.

At first, this makes Jeremy doubt his sanity, but gradually he begins to reconstruct his past, searching for what he might have done to warrant the attention of a spymaster capable of unearthing his deepest secrets. I Am No One reads like a collaboration between spy novelist John le Carré and Franz Kafka, the early 20th-century master of alienation and existential anxiety.

It is at once a beautifully written slow-motion thriller, an unnerving story of fear and paranoia, and a cautionary tale about the perils of spy satellites, security cameras and electronic surveillance by faceless, Big Brother-style government bureaucrats.

“A country without privacy,” one character says, “is a country without freedom.”