The Dimensions of a Cave

by Greg Jackson

A virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist.

When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones's story about covert military interrogation practices in the Desert War is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper, and he unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation.

As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce--who, like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier--keep emerging.

Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave is a virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption. It explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, Thriller, Speculative Fiction, Book Club

480 pages, Hardcover

Published October 24, 2023

About the author

Greg Jackson's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has been a fiction fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a resident at the MacDowell Colony, and he holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Virginia.

Reviews

[Branden Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Dimensions of a Cave starts with a poem and reads like one. It's dripping noir style, with flecks of Hunter S Thompson, or William S. Burroughs. The luxurious descriptions, and freeflowing style reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which Woolf called not a novel but a "playpoem". The Dimensions of a Cave is far more considered than that, but the words and ideas still flow and cascade into one another, rising and falling in intensity like ocean tides. It's this misty, pleasant feeling that suffuses Dimensions-- and beyond the crime and drama, this is the true draw for the book.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Exactly my kind of book — inverting and stretching genre over literary fiction, sci-fi and politics thrown in. Creative, but held back by style. If only the book could just get out of its own way.

Far too long. Too much showing off. Awkward time killed between genre plot points with verbose navel gazing and passages that seemed designed to confuse the reader.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

After sitting on completing "The Dimensions of a Cave" and letting it really sink in, I think the best way to start a review is with one of my favorite quotes (probably have 50 marked), that even out of context conveys the beauty and phantasmal nature of the book.

We met each other with quiet eyes. I thought, glancing out at the skeins of moving fog and crushed marble of cloud, that I might have been gazing out over the sea she described, that our bearing was a return and a venturing forth, a home unto itself, that it was the companionability of the unfinished, which is the companionability of the sea, and I hoped—I don’t know how to say it—that we should live forever in the safekeeping of this passage, in this mood trembling and rolling with the waves, a motion that grew from such subtle, unknown reaches in the depths that we felt cradled by secret hands. It was a glorious day, dark glowering and glorious, and full of a conversation that like the rain was everywhere and purifying, with a lament that protects the embers of such necessary light against the cold and damp of what is only actual, passing, real.

I don't know how else to put this, but this is 'a reader's read' - every sentence Greg Jackson delivers through Quentin's journey inward, inverse, and outward again is dripping with style, depth, and the utmost nuance. It almost feels purposeful that the complexity of the actual story being told (both literally and the philosophical runoffs) matches the immense intent put into every line. Nothing feels unnecessarily added, and while the density of the book is matter of fact and may detract some just on that basis, I couldn't find any passages that felt like filler. Truthfully, I haven't needed to look up so many unfamiliar words in well... longer than I can remember, and I applaud the upfront challenge to the reader and the author's ability to produce something so verbose, yet constructed so beautifully all at once without feeling like a tangent.

It took me awhile to get through this - in this case for the better - as the moment you start the first chapter you know that this demands your full attention. I argue the journey is worth it if you're really looking for a modern piece of literature to blow your fucking mind and make you question everything.

Thank you VIRTUE: for the ARC!

[Al Truscott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greg Jackson’s first novel, The Dimensions of a Cave, explores the nature of consciousness through Quentin Jones, a reporter for the Beacon (a stand-in for the Washington Post). He becomes entangled in the rabbit-hole of a government program known as VIRTUE. Initially created to interrogate suspects painlessly using artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it morphed into a complete metaverse in which Jones’ younger colleague, Bruce Willrich, has disappeared. In the end, Jackson lays out a thesis for computer consciousness based on Plato’s Parable of the Cave.
Jackson begins with the unpromising use of the first-person plural point-of-view, as four friends from journalism school hold a reunion on what might be Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Gradually, Quentin’s voice emerges, and he becomes the primary narrator. Transitions between the afternoons and evenings when Quentin unfolds his tale are handled by a return to the first-person plural. Adding to the mix, Bruce takes over when he and Quentin meet in VIRTUE, and Jackson uses Bruce’s voice to refine and speculate on his kaleidoscopic vision.
We are propelled into an alternative present where AI can swallow one’s awareness whole, creating a metaverse in which Quentin (and Bruce) manipulate the seemingly real environment, filled with very familiar people and places from their shared life. Bruce, reflecting on his time caught up in the corruption of the US-Afghan war, takes us on an extended journey through the perennial bestiality of humankind.
As the narrative unfolds, Jackson becomes more interested in his philosophical inquiries than with following the standard arc of a detective novel. While the first half of the book has Quentin following a series of leads and sources ever deeper into an opaque government bureaucracy, the second half explores the nature of perception and reality through the lens of Plato’s Parable. This serves as a conceptual anchor for Jackson’s examination of human and computer consciousness, raising questions about the nature of self-awareness and the ethical implications of technology.
Amidst the techno-dystopian setting, Jackson weaves a nuanced exploration of the nature and value of love. Bruce and Quentin both had a relationship with Jade, a lawyer who appears both their real world, and their shared VR. And, Quentin and Cy are in the midst of a slow-motion break-up while he travels further into the world of VIRTUE. This portrayal of the complexities of human connection in the face of advancing technology adds a welcome emotional depth.
Lyrical descriptions of the natural world punctuate the story, offering moments of respite and reflection, serving as a counter-balance to the political dangers Quentin uncovers. Otherwise, we might be overwhelmed by the stranglehold Jackson fears in both democratic and autocratic states over their economic milieu and the behavior of individuals within them.
This is not an easy book to take in. Jackson’s prose has strong echoes of early Thomas Pynchon. Sentences abound which require re-reading two or three times to cut through the unique syntax. At least once every 10 pages, I had to stop and look up an unfamiliar word; once defined, I felt it was either unnecessary, used poorly, or could have been replaced with minimal loss of understanding. Examples: thewy, lemniscates, sempiternal, rufous, jallissant, antres, penetralium; amazingly, most of these are in my word processor’s spell check. I can only assume that Jackson and his editors were being deliberately obtuse. The esotericism challenges the reader to slow down and examine the layers of meaning hidden within the labyrinth of ideas and observations. The intellectual stimulation is captivating at the expense of artistic coherence.
In a literary landscape dominated by formulaic storytelling, The Dimensions of a Cave engages in unbridled creativity. It is not as complex or clearly written as Pynchon’s Against the Day, and not as expansive as Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Jackson may be on the path towards the vistas they revealed, or he may end up in Gonzo storyland following Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

[Brian Hanson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Can this guy write a simple sentence: one that doesn't feel like it's been over-polished into near incomprehensibility, then held up for universal approval? OK, I couldn't bear to read too much of it, so this is based on limited exposure ... A symptom of the debut novelist?

[BobK21 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is essentially a contemporary and extended Platonic/Socratic dialogue. It explores various universal questions concerning the form and flow of existential complexity, the nature of human selfhood and the challenges of political organization, and our capacities for perception and self-deception in both our private and public lives, all seen through the glass of a fiction roughly speculating on the possible near-term consequences of the manners in which we are presently interacting with computational technologies at our particular moment in history.

It develops the (to me at least) very interesting premise that a possible growing tip of virtual reality and artificial intelligence innovation and proliferation could be state operators seeking to create novel virtual environments for the manipulation or exploitation of various populations of the governed. In my opinion though the execution fell flat compared to the intrigue of the premise. Like other reviews have mentioned, this work felt overwritten to me.

There were 10-12 passages that really grabbed me as lucid and incisive considerations of the aforementioned universal questions and particular historical challenges, but I could never fully shake the desire to be reading a ~120 page non-fiction essay investigating the topics raised in those passages instead of the novel as presented in its final form. The author seems to be genuinely concerned with intelligent public discourse and discussion centered on the topics surveyed in the novel, but I feel that he could have applied the same style and structure utilized in the novel to greater effect and clarity in a more compressed speculative essay.

[Justine · Rating 1 out of 5]

He really thought he did somn here

Reasons for single star:

I. Using a thesaurus to jazz up common sayings (I wasn’t born yesterday edited to “I wasn’t born two days before tomorrow,” is soooooooooooo annoying)

II. I love a good plotless book. I do. I can appreciate long, complex sentences and streams of consciousness. But this book had me thinking stfu stfu SHUT UP while the middle aged loser MC was meandering on his 400 page philosophical monologue that lead pretty much nowhere in terms of the storyline I was promised on the cover flap. If more of the story surrounding the musings had been more action-packed/fleshed out, a better balance may have been struck between the philosophy set forth and its vehicle

III. Many of the characters lack distinctive uvoices and tend to blur together, which maybe can be technically forgiven since they’re all being filtered through multiple degrees of narration, but it gets hard to follow when my eyes are glazing over pages and superfluous pages of nothing

IV. Why did the climax of the novel contain a brief history of what is the immutable way of the world? God grant him the serenity PLEASE.

[Leif Quinlan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greg Jackson has some thoughts... The Dimensions of a Cave is a philosophical treatise on the nature of our current cultural moment (in the developed world, at least). The philosophical stance is clearly presented and unimpeachable (would anybody living in 2025 truly argue that we've allowed technology to enforce and entrench our own and shared visions of the shadows on the cave wall rather than to transcend them and also to encourage empathy atrophy by pushing us towards "think-alikes"?) with many, many sentences, points, and entire vignettes that excited - a coherent novel, however, it is not
First of all, the truest magic of "Apocalypse Now" (and that's a perfect film) is that Kurtz is worth the wait (I did read Heart of Darkness but it's been long enough that I can't confidently speak to its power). Bruce... isn't (though his 30-page soliloquy on the history of violence and cruelty was captivating)
I don't know what happened in this book to any kind of certainty, nor do I really know even what any character's motivation was. Why did the cabal seek out Quentin and send him in after Bruce? Why did Bruce go in at all, and why did he stay? Why did they care that he wouldn't come out? It was just in his own mind, so... go ahead, Dawg. What was he supposed to have been doing while in there? Did I just miss it? Why was this program a problem at all? Seemed like a really good way of extracting information without torture but for some reason we don't want it? What? I could go on and on. Nothing held together at all
However - the philosophy was topical and compelling, and Jackson is a talented writer. I suspect The Dimensions of a Cave is his overly excited premature ejaculation book and that his mature third novel will be significant and impressive

[Jeff Carpenter · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was written in the impending subjunctive, the clause that poses the premise that if you knew what you're going to know, you might be interested already enough to diagram which of the missing elements fits in whose neuroses, with the conjunctive of possible intellectualized flirting and/or feckless foreplay, leaving room for enough extra prose playing the part of vamping along until a better idea materializes.

[Julia V. Hendrickson · Rating 1 out of 5]

No, thank you. I did read through to the end, but regret it. (FYI: Major violence content trigger warning toward the end, around pg. 350.) Massively needed an editor. Clinical and cold. An exceedingly painful reliance on the thesaurus throughout. Remain intrigued by the summary / topic, but this book did not do the ideas justice.

[Anton_Asher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterfully done.
My Pynchonian chums will devour this for its political and philosophical themes and blending of genre. That's not even mentioning the prose. The prose, man. I'm in love.

[Joanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this!

It’s quite verbose and philosophical (so probably not for everyone), but I thought it was beautifully written.

[Ronak AhmadyAhangar · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trying way too hard to impress… it didn’t.

[Daniel Schulof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very impressive, particularly for a first novel.

The sprawling scope and technology-adjacent themes and subject matter sophistication are Pynchonian.

I loved the narrative voice, particularly when it reflects on the natural world. Sometimes gets a bit grandiose in its willingness to imbue every natural phenomenon with deep significance, but I liked it anyway. If McCarthy can do it then it’s no major sin. And it pairs nicely with the detached, seen-it-all reporter-speak.

The plotting wasn’t a strong point but it held together well enough not to detract hugely.

The climactic conversation with Bruce was utterly devastating. I thought that was the perfect place to let the reins out on the maximalism and really go for it. The catalog of human horrors was as powerful a passage as I’ve recently read.

I’ll be eagerly anticipating Jackson’s next book.

[Jenni Link · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an ambitious novel, invoking or evoking Plato, Conrad, Pynchon, Dick, Ellul, etc in a noir-detective exploration of consciousness, propaganda, power, and the nature of being. Sounded right up my alley. The strongest part is the dialogue, and some of the philosophizing put into the mouths of minor characters whom the protagonist encounters along his journey is very compelling. But the narration is incredibly overwrought, the prose embarrassingly purple and patience-trying, the first half or so of the story teasing revelations that the latter parts fail to deliver or even engage in a satisfying manner. For the first half, I kept myself reading by surmising that the main character must be such a blowhard for some reason that would turn out to be key to the narrative. (Perhaps our Philip Marlowe / Ancient Mariner / Rick Deckard, the several dames who can't resist him, and his odd Greek chorus of former classmates will turn out to be video game characters?) But when Quentin finally meets his Kurtz in Part V, Bruce is even more of a self-serious bore, their interaction leads nowhere but to more (and more, and more) overly-verbose navel-gazing, and poof! the dream is over, having led nowhere. One of the central conceits of the novel is that we are so limited by our own experience / consciousness that it is questionable whether other people can ever really be real to us: 'I' am the main character and everyone else is an NPC. The experience of reading this book felt to me like being an other on the receiving end of one of those 'I's. The narrator(s) prattle on, certain that everyone is hanging on their every overly-ornamented word, while the reader looks at her watch. Rather than turning from the bridegroom's door stunned, sadder, and wiser, this wedding guest was ready for the open bar.

[Janine Domingos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started this book while working. It was a mistake. Only during the holidays I could submerge on "The Dimensions of a Cave".
The monologues are intense and needed full attention while reading. Ten pages per day would not cut it.

Overall a very pleasant read. Sometimes a bit out of the box.

---
"But would you say religion is merely the bureaucratization of spiritual life?"

"Normalcy is the camouflage of the new age. Iconoclasm, individuality, idiosyncratic thought—all those qualities we cherished are liabilities now."

"For in dreams we betray ourselves as naturally as we breathe. Our secrets suffuse the fabric of reality as they do the tissue of our minds."

[sweet t · Rating 4 out of 5]

greg is my mf boy so i have nothing but love and endless criticism for this book. more ambitious than most mfs and also, man, what a swing and a miss in so many regards. but also what a triumph. dude can maybe outwrite almost anyone alive. fucked with my head as much as the most irresponsible psychedelic trips have and reminded me how dead symbols are in the endless attempt to sharpen our spirits and love as deeply as able.

anyways greg write another book

[Nathan Clark · Rating 1 out of 5]

1 hour of Intresting content in a 10 hour book.

[E. C. Koch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a tough, philosophically driven novel about, well, just about every contemporary tech-focused question there is. The story follows an investigative reporter, Quentin, trying to track down the designers responsible for a virtual reality world, and who then finds out that his old buddy – who Quentin thinks died covering the war – is in this VR world and doesn’t want to come out again, and who then goes in to retrieve him, and then doesn’t, and this is all told in a frame narrative from the perspective of a friend of Quentin’s telling us what Quentin said. Foof. What this sets up is a means of exploring questions related to the nature and definition of reality, ethics in VR space and reality, definitions of life in VR space and reality, the meaning and consequences of death in VR space and in reality, and on and on. Jackson overdoes the exposition here, writes brilliant dialogue, and came up about two-hundred pages short for me. There’s a lot here but it’s work.

[BooksRgood · Rating 3 out of 5]

A jam packed novel - overly so at times - with an interesting idea as the driver… and a journalist telling his colleagues about his experience investigating that idea.
I like books that teach me new words, and there were plenty of them, but the authors skill and intelligence was flaunted so hard some times it made me roll my eyes! Get like a slog at times

Some new words for me:

nuncupative: oral, not written.

kerning: the distance between a kerned pair of adjacent characters in a line of composed text.

spinney: a small wood with undergrowth

Ludonarrative dissonance is the conflict between a video game's narrative told through the non-interactive elements and the narrative told through the gameplay. Ludonarrative, a compound portmanteau of ludology and narrative, refers to the intersection in a video game of ludic elements (gameplay) and narrative elements.

crypsis is the ability of an animal or a plant[1] to avoid observation or detection by other animals

Some passages:

Never bet against how much a stone edifice and a little ivy can inflate a person's idea of himself.

Maybe I was tired of doing the listening, the asking, and so I talked. I told her about high school, the rural tracts on the outskirts of our county seat, the spreading bloom of suburban crust; how the ethic of our practical, proud, nowhere town bred cockiness, and a disdain for cockiness, in the boys I knew and had been one of, the clever restless boys who competed at everything. Though I had a high enough opinion of myself when I left for college, I had never applied myself with any rigor or grit. I figured it was the same for everyone. Do what's asked of you, do it well enough to get along. Don't do it so diligently that you lose your self-respect. Keep your head down and never brag. I took it as an article of faith that my experience ran inside the common channel and didn't see that most people found their level and contented themselves to float. This came as a shock-when I realized that beyond my natural laziness, nothing held me back. I'd never run up against my limit, never tested it, because we'd have pummeled and mocked and immiserated anyone who tried to distinguish himself that way. Oh, the embarrassment of being caught trying! There wasn't anything worse. Unless your excellence was incontestable, a fluke of birth like a four-seamer in the mid-nineties, you shut up about it. You were one of the guys. It didn't enter your head to overexert yourself. Just above average was fine. Turning in schoolwork late. Writing the occasional paper good enough to drive your teacher crazy, stacked against your other failures. There was a small-town pride in being by turns excellent and galling, stalwart and wicked. I relished an idea of myself as normal, and we saw something sacred in the ingenuous modesty that distinguished normal from the aspirants and blowhards.

The war was a series of concentric circles each with its own logic and imperatives; by the time you got to the inner core-face-to-face combat in the valleys and hills-none of the larger urgencies remained. No global or patriotic principle. It was survival and brotherhood, finis.

She stood beside me. She had taken my arm, not romantically but with a hint of missing that formal and expiring chivalry which is a couple at the end of a long day, not needing anything of each other, not even speech; asking only the ease of standing side by side, from time to time, and looking at a world in shared wonder and disappointment, in a companionship that needs no words as the cars pass quietly in the street.

And like so many teachers the country over, she seemed to have passed on to her children, and to Quentin most of all, the idea that a taste for books can carry you anywhere in life.

This is what united us, what must unite us: this allegiance to ideals that sit above our near affiliations-to the self, the job, the institution, the role. The knowledge that we are keepers and protectors, arrayed not only against the outside threat, but against the inside threat too, the threat our own power amounts to once we decide that we know best. It is only human to want to seize the reins and fix what ails us. But this is what we must fear most of all: the false equation of power with wisdom, our reflex to choose an expedient good over a muddled process. The process, we must understand, is everything: means and end. The process is the ideal, and thus what our noblest energies must fall to protecting. For the process is the balance that makes an organism healthy and adaptive. That which allows it to respond to truth and to lie, to stasis and change. We may see worthy goals at hand, but only the organism of justice, so much larger than any one of us, can sum these goals to form the larger vision we call a people. A civilization. This vast addition outstrips our minds' ability. And few can summon that peculiar love that is love for other people's freedom to let us down.

Reality is what doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.


'I began to wonder, she continued, 'where the impulse to seek justice comes from. I don't mean the instinct for fairness, but the adoption of justice as a cause. Children learn a cosmic order from their parents, whether they understand it that way or not. And does that not raise the question of whether our longing for justice isn't really a longing for childhood: not the values of our parents, but the coherent moral order that is only possible in childhood and within a family? Might we say that our fixation on the plight of the weak holds within it a primordial memory of our own smallness and vulnerability as children, and the comforting idea that an inviolate set of rules might compensate for this weakness?


'Passion? Love?'
She chuckled lightly. 'Maybe." She put her hand to her temple and rested her head on it, regarding me for a long time, as if to say, Is that what this is?—as if, I thought, to ask whether we ever have experiences with another person, or only inside the locked box of our minds and therefore with ourselves. But I was too far down the path of finding everything in her compass precious to stop and wonder, or care, whether love emerged from a recognition of oneself in another, or represented the closest contact or intoxication we could achieve with the foreign element.

Bruce refused to spend money on anything and this meant senseless cost cutting. Penny-wise, pound-foolish: that was him in a nutshell, fixated on his battles to the exclusion of all else. Maybe a trace of something impure burned in him alongside his passion, a contaminant sparking chemical green in the flame. His moral impulse seemed at times less about goodness than his great desire to punish badness. He wanted to afflict the comfortable-men like his father, whose compromises he knew too intimately. He intuited that his moral sense had been purchased from the spoils of his father's self-serving efforts. Every cent negotiated out of an employee's paycheck ran together into the river of plenty that nourished him, the expiating child, who would atone for the sins that had created him. No, his father's sins weren't so bad; Bruce had his sights on the dark-winged angel that enfolded men like him in its wings. They hadn't sold the controlling interest in their souls, but only a portion in hope that the full organ would grow back. They meant to have it both ways, and this seemed almost worse to him. It asked less courage than true evil and so it blossomed pervasively. Everyday corruption required nothing special of its human host beyond weakness and cowardice. It meant to cheat fate.

Will we be punished for our sins? I doubt it. Not unless we do the punishing ourselves.

What we know, as reporters, is that the process of understanding can fix the shape of what is understood too soon.
Maybe, as Nat Shannon believed, it all comes down to which questions you see fit to ask yourself. There are so many angles on reality, and we inhabit our own evolving confusion, strung as tight as catgut on the pegs of personality. No reporter is exempt.

Don’t tell me you never had the moment sitting in the newsroom when you see that it's all a lie, all those brave stories about truth and holding power to account, and facts, facts! When you realize there are limits. You see that you are part of an organism that exists in society, that a paper is owned, a private business or public corporation, that it needs to make money, that its publisher and its editors go to the same cocktail parties, sit on the same boards, befriend the same lawyers and businesspeople who cycle in and out of politics, run multinationals, whose kids go to the same schools, whose entire sense of society overlaps because the main fact of society for them is that they are members of a select elite who, in their unwitting consensus, decide what society is, what the story of it will be, and when you see, therefore, that the story you want to tell your truth-cannot be the story that says the corruption reaches to the top and infects the storytelling apparatus itself, that there is this limit on the truth you can tell, and that this limit afflicts every last word you utter and sentence you print, afflicts it fatally, and makes you merely, like al the others, one more patch of wall in the endless corridors down which power echoes.'

Thus the sinuous plummet Quentin's thoughts chased down in the aftermath of his ordeal. Conspiracy was the tribal mysticism of modern man, powerless and disaffected, tantalized by just enough shadow and secret to spin out his nutty religion. It was no different from how our ancestors had turned suggestive intimations into a protoscience of the cosmos. The saturation of technology gave a false assurance that we had passed beyond superstition, but conspiracists showed how hard it was to dislodge a magic belief in the consequence of our interventions. This was the longing to believe people, individuals, still called the shots. A fantasy of enduring relevance, a yearning for a world coherent on a human scale.
Quentin felt the tug but couldn't join those muttering pitiful elegies to a power they'd never truly possessed.

All the time we’re vouchsafed fleeting intimations of the riddles that exceeded us, blinding flashes, and we startle, shrink from them, and turn away into the dim repetitions that permit us to forget what seized us.

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crimes of the Spirit

This is a novel about power. Professional power. Governmental power. Scientific power. The power of art. Power in relationships. Ultimately the accumulation of power to oneself. And how power works, especially when abused. The book, I think, offers something new, or at least a new interpretation of the perennial attempt to deal with power as a fundamental fact of human existence. It’s sci-fi but only just (see https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6...).

The striving for power is our original sin. We want things that other people don’t want to give us. So we coerce them. We want to create things that require many other people to realise. So we persuade people to do what they otherwise wouldn’t do. Others want us to contribute to realising their desires in conflict with our own. So we resist and if necessary resist with violence. There is no escape from the striving for power and we are constantly inventing new forms of grabbing for it, many criminal but as the book’s protagonist points out “There are crimes we don’t even have words for yet. Crimes of the psyche, the spirit.” These crimes of power-seeking are what Jackson explores.

The principle weapon of power is language, the power of language embodied in communication, in technology and in law. Who controls this embodied language has the power to coerce, persuade and resist others in their striving for power. Language is “the immaterial machine, which writes itself out of perceptibility by suggesting it is only the transparent, ineffable medium of our lives.” We are in other words “flies caught in webs. We didn’t make the webs.”

And words can kill. They have ethical import. Words translated into code and algorithms can kill with exquisite subtlety. And like the inverse of a neutron bomb, they can kill the spirit - that which is not linguistic in human beings - while leaving the physical person unharmed.

…[W]hat the algorithms want, reward, and select for, and as our desire to rebel against this becomes yet another way to manipulate us, one more tactic to exploit while the policing function moves inward and installs itself, like the most potent software, in the alloy of our brains.”

As the journalist Quentin Jones, Jackson’s protagonist, knows, using language to confront power and undermine it is a paradoxical endeavour.

“‘We use abstractions to hold on to realities too big and messy to approach as they are’, Quentin said. ‘This was the root of human knowledge and power. But our abstractions ruled us and turned deadly precisely for what made them powerful in the first place: that they suggested we could encounter and subdue far more than we could.’”

Sin cannot overcome sin, even with good intentions. Idealism and power-seeking are necessarily linked. To desire an ideal implies the desire for the means to achieve that ideal whatever that ideal may be - science, peace, personal salvation, or even truth. Ideals inevitably become rationalisations for the most horrible human actions. Idealists are tolerated because “Realists have always slept better knowing that idealists are out there dying in the name of justice.”

So terrorists threaten atrocities in the name of justice. And their potential victims counter with atrocities in the name of protection. First with disinformation, then with propaganda, then with rationalisations and justifications, then physical violence, made extreme through the faculty of the scientific, sociological, and psychological plans, designs, and command-structures of language. Or alternatively, according to Jackson’s story, through the latest language-technology of Artificial Intelligence, an entirely linguistic reality which both shapes desires and fulfils them simultaneously - “the numerology of the soul.”

So who has power in such a safety-hungry world? According to Greg Jackson, and I think correctly, it is language itself. Of course it has to be. This is what Thomas Ligotti has called The Conspiracy Against The Human Race (see https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It is in the nature of language to induce us to hide what is not-language from us, including ourselves. We unwittingly allow language to become reality.

The only way to outsmart language is to recognise the seemingly divine power of language and to essentially do something it doesn’t expect. The ancient Egyptians recognised language as the product of divine creation and knew they couldn’t really comprehend it. By making it a god, Thoth, they saw its own subjectivity as a living entity. Medieval mystics - Christians like St. John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, and Jewish Kabbalists like Nachmanides and Abulafia - undermined the power of language by divorcing it from all referents except itself. Poets of all ages from Homer and the biblical authors have twisted language to the point of incomprehension in order to make it say things it prefers not to.

The common historical strategy is clear. Language cannot be used anywhere or anytime without giving it more power, or overcome therefore by language. The only possibly effective approach available is to succumb to language totally, to give up, to recognise its invincibility, and hope to turn its power upon itself by allowing it to go wherever it wants. That is, by accepting language as reality and dealing with it as such. We can then consciously explore language and its effects from the inside as it were, within the belly of the beast (or the interactive simulation we’ve become part of) without being overcome by it. The search then becomes not one for power but for what might be called “the dark matter of the soul.”

It takes a clever journalist like Jackson’s Quentin Jones to undermine the latest technological ploy of language to give it yet more power. In essence his strategy is compatible with the Egyptians, the mystics and the poets - the recognition that everything he writes is fraudulent because language is in control. His mission is to create a “rigorous but rigorously incomplete story.” This is the “necessary, timeless fraud of the human endeavour.” Quentin is fully aware that, quite apart from any technological dominance of his experience, “The story had me; I didn’t have it. ”

And indeed, Jackson’s story had me, I didn’t have it.

[B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dimensions of a Cave is first and foremost an ambitious and complex book. Its subject matter is weighty and its scope is expansive. But it's also an engrossing read. (I devoured the book in about three days and at one point actually laughted out loud.) Yes, the first 30 pages or so are dense with characters and government-speak/ acronyms. You will be confused. But don't give up. I never mark up books but I found myself underlining sentences, such was the quality of the writing.

The first half or so follows a journalist investigating a government program and pursuing different leads in "the capitol" (a.k.a. contemporary DC). The dialog is clever and bantering and anachronistically noir-ish. For this reason some people will prefer the first half of the book. But I really loved the second half, which takes place largely in an unnamed city at an unnamed time but strikes me as a dead ringer for 1980s New York. (I don't want to give too much away...) The protagonist tracks down sources to artist squats and downtown nightclubs...dark, funny, cinematic scenes interspersed with probing philosophical insights.

There is a lot packed into this book. A lot of characters, a lot of plot, a lot of ideas. This might turn some people off but for me it was a revelation.

[Ilya]

"'If you want to be really bloodless about it,' she said, 'you could say stories are an especially useful storage format, a type of compression, and consciousness is the program that unpacks it.'"

This novel is full of sharp, improbable dialogue, like the above (which I underlined, it excited me that much.)

An image of Stephen Rea haunted me, his character from Hugo Blick's show "The Shadow Line" — the world-weary bureaucrat: cynical but not lacking a conscience, with an acute awareness of the greater game and the moral compromises it imposes.

There are no dud sentences, paragraphs, or ideas here. Jackson is very fond of, and very good at, describing light conditions: "dim, squalid, neon-dappled streets," "the cab window ran bleary with rain, the subfusc evening smudging and muting the city's storefront lights."

This is virtuoso stuff, and for about the first 200 pages or so I was entranced. But the balance is off, I think. One character is introduced after another, but rarely do they mingle or interact or recur — except in the narrator's mind. You feel you are moving in slow-setting concrete as you approach the end. More bureaucrat needed, with more dialogue, and fewer lengthy disquisitions on whatever. I loved this book in spite of this.

[Jack Brown · Rating 2 out of 5]

The blurb for this book had me quite excited to read my first fiction book in some time. The story kicked off with a (fairly trite but still) compelling theme - investigative journalist is told to drop a story on a government program but pushes through anyways. The author had beautiful prose, the characters had interesting backstories, the main character is stuck with deep philosophical questions - I was excited to keep going.

Unfortunately the storylines fell by the wayside and I struggled to stay engaged with the book. Every sentence became the author's personal competition to improve on the grandiosity of the previous sentence. The author seemed to prioritize wearing out the pages of his thesaurus over telling a story (or even attempting to allude to any interesting philosophical conclusions). The back half of the book could have been written in 3 pages while answering more questions and furthering the story.

[Jill Olswanger · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great book lies within this baggy monster- the editor was MIA- truly a book of ideas, about appearances vs. reality, responsibility, love, war, politics, journalism- it's pretty much about everything, which is one of its weaknesses. Mr. Jackson loves archaic obtuse language and digressions that show off his writing (at times great) and ideas. The writing truly swung from sublime to ridiculous. He throws out so many ideas your head will be spinning, some of them sophomoric abstractions and others truly inspiring.

A main theme, and a timely and important one, is freedom vs. security- "..terrorism ups the stakes. It turns a qualitative question into a quantitative one: how many lives are our rights worth?" "The hubris in our fantasy of control,... how much more complicated the world was than our abstractions allowed.." One of his thoughts I liked (I will omit the many that confounded me): "We place the burden of living without contradiction on the young. We ask them to embody the simpler moral world we wished we lived in and leave them unprepared for life."

[Clayton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I usually don’t have the mental stamina to write reviews after the end of a book, so this review is my first on this site (although I am a relatively new user). I feel compelled to write about Greg Jackson’s first novel mostly to encourage potential readers to dive in. Like some other reviewers, I was initially skeptical of my ability to finish this book due to the sheer density of the prose. (This likely has more to do with my own subclinical ADHD than anything else.) But somewhere around page 100, it all clicked. I was completely entranced from there until the end. Yes, parts of the dialogue are perhaps TOO smart to be realistic. But the essential themes and ideas in this book are presented so brilliantly that it didn’t bother me. Bravo to Greg Jackson — I can’t wait to see what’s next.

[Pete Camp · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressive offering for a debut novelist. The story is loosely based around an investigative journalist whose story about military interrogation practices is relegated to the back pages and he delves deeper to find a company that simulates reality during the interrogations. In the age of AI this was very relatable, the novel explores several different themes , the forefront obviously being technology and its prevalence in the world, government corruption is also another theme widely discussed throughout the novel
Consciousness and reality are also recurrent motifs throughout the book, especially in regards to technology
“ How is it that we create and live in structures we cannot comprehend, and what mistakes do we invite by reducing vast, anarchic circuits to the scale of contemplation, thereby imposing on them our moral errors and hopes?”

[sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

something about the way this book is written reminds me of books from an earlier era, yet in another way it feels like it was written for this exact moment, when there's so much violence and tumult in the world. technology has allowed us to experience it in real time but we witness it at such a remove that it becomes abstract. i'm reminded of this passage: 

"we use abstractions to hold on to realities too big and messy to approach as they are, quentin said. this was the root of human knowledge and power. but our abstractions ruled us and turned deadly precisely for what made them powerful in the first place: that they suggested we could encounter and subdue far more than we could."

stories (literature, journalism) are a way of making sense of reality. but what's the purpose of stories when reality itself becomes more and more virtual, mediated, abstract?

[Ryan MacInnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really mixed feelings on this one. He’s an incredible writer but it feels like he got too caught up on plot. Literary, poetical Neal Stephenson. It feels like it’s all exposition, various scenes of conversations. Maybe all books are but it felt especially noticeable. And the plot feels basic to me, but maybe because it’s about all the stuff I think about all the time. You know when you meet someone and you have so much in common you dislike them out of defensiveness, they’re edging into your niche? I have a feeling I would feel that way if I met Greg Jackson. I’m very very excited to read his next book, I feel like he’s gotten the “big important novel” out of his system and he can just write a smaller story about people.

[Avery C. M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found a lot of the philosophical talk very interesting. that being said, if that isn't what you're into, you might have a hard time reading this book.

I felt that some parts were way too long, and if you're reading this book, you'll know when you get there. In addition, there were some plot-lines and characters that never got returned too that I would have enjoyed seeing again.

All in all though, it isn't bad and is quite enjoyable at times.

Some of the dialogue has this noir detective feel to it that is entertaining, and the dialogue in general isn't bad. I feel it's very topical in its subject matter and makes a clear statement upon it.