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There's a book that I... Well, what exactly? Love is the wrong word for how I feel about The Montauk Project, after all. I am suspicious of its politics. I think it's sort of stupid and clumsily put together. Also, I don't believe a word of it. But I am fascinated nonetheless. There is something strangely rich about the kind of global conspiracy madness that The Montauk Project traffics in, something undeniably potent. I don't love it, then, but I am glad I came across it. Here's the thing about The Montauk Project: it claims to be a true story, and then you read it and realise it can't be. Its basic thrust is that, over in Montauk, on the edge of Long Island, there's an abandoned air force base where some really weird stuff once went down. So far, who cares? This is a set-up you might find in any number of sci fi novels or video games, but with The Montauk Project, the details are so weird and thrilling. You've got a narrator whose memory has been wiped, blinding him to the fact that he's already a key player in the plot he's just started to uncover. You've got the Philadelphia Experiment, Tesla, and John Von Neumann - and this Von Neumann secretly survived into the 1970s. You've also got trips through time to a distant point in the future where humanity is gone and all that remains is a statue of a golden horse, with a mysterious inscription beneath it. We've been sending people through a wormhole to try and get a reading of that inscription, apparently. What can it say? What can it mean?
The question of meaning is key to the book's appeal, I think, and that question of meaning gets a strange charge from the simple trick the writers plays with the framing. Again: this clearly seems to be fiction, but it's dressed up as fact. I know it's rubbish, and yet, rational as I tell myself I am, whenever I re-read it, a tiny, strangely credulous part of me wonders: yes, but what if...? It's the part of me that gets all tangled up with ghosts. I don't believe in ghosts, and yet I also hope very dearly that I'll never have to meet one.
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