The novel “Who?” by Algis Budrys was published for the first time in 1958. It’s set during a Cold War which evolved differently from what really happened since the ’60s. In a laboratory where a top secret project is being developed there’s a serious accident in which Dr. Lucas Martino is seriously injured. The lab is near the border with the Eastern bloc and the Soviets are the first to rush, bringing Dr. Martino to one of their hospitals for the proper treatments.
After months of tension and negotiations the Soviets return Dr. Martino to the Western bloc but the man is unrecognizable. According to the Soviets his injuries were so serious as to force them to replace part of his head including his entire face, an arm and various organs with artificial equivalents. The Soviets in fact have developed advanced medical / surgical techniques to create artificial limbs and organs perfectly functioning.
Inevitably suspicion arises that the man is actually a Soviet spy since even his organic arm shows signs of extensive surgery so the Soviets could have attached the real Martino’s arm to a spy’s body so that the fingerprints are the right ones. How can they tell whether the man is a spy or Martino?
“Who?” is Algis Budrys’s most famous novel as it was made into a film with the same title. The author was born in Lithuania so he understood the situation in Eastern Europe and took advantage of the Cold War paranoia to build one of his best psychological plots.
Inevitably today the basic concept of the novel seems weird: we’re now used to determine the identity of a person simply by a DNA test so the idea of a world where they can replace a man’s body parts with artificial equivalents which today would be called bionic but there’s no DNA test is strange. We must remember that in 1958 research on DNA were still at pioneering level so you need to think about the situation in this alternate future in which even medicine took different paths: at that point you can appreciate this novel.
“Who?” is more a psychological thriller than a political science fiction story because the key point is the identity of the man returned by the Soviets. The novel is narrated in two parallel lines cleverly developed in alternating chapters: one starts with the return of the man to the Western bloc telling the attempts to understand who he really is, the other is Lucas Martino’s biography and as is typical of Algis Budrys we discover not only what the protagonist did during his life but also his way of thinking, his ways of facing problems and the motivations that led him to make his choices.
“Who?” focuses on the problem of the identity, how it’s related to physical appearance and the reactions of people who have to deal with a person with no facial expressions. This is in some ways an updated version of the novel “Invisible Man” by H.G. Wells: it’s not accidental that during the story the mysterious man also uses bandages to cover his artificial head.
Due to the fact that the length is in the standards of the time when the novel was written – less than 200 pages – Algis Budrys can keep the tension up until the end developing Lucas Martino’s story until after his accident to reveal only at the conclusion the real Soviets plans.
Today “Who?” could be considered an alternate history novel given the many differences between the described world and our own. This is one of the best works by Algis Budrys and should be considered a classic you have to read.
