Shift

The novel’s antagonist, Senator Paul Thurman is a seasoned politician who has learned from many years in Congress how to manipulate the system. He attempts to explain this to Donald Keene upon his arrival in Washington, DC, but it’s a lesson that takes Donald a long time to learn. At the novel’s beginning, Thurman seems like a typical politician, focused on projects that help advance his own career. This includes an energy project meant to provide a storage place for nuclear waste that has been building in the US since the Manhattan Project. On the surface, this project will provide thousands of jobs for his constituents in Georgia and a solution for a decades-long problem. Anna, his daughter, calls this project her father’s legacy.

Thurman teaches Donald that one must treat the truth and lies in the same way: with denial. In this way, a politician can never be called out for telling an outright lie, and if the truth shifts, the politician can shift with it. Thurman even uses this practice on Donald, telling him only part of the truth when he asks him to help design the silos where survivors of a nuclear bombing will live for millennia. As Donald spends years of his life working on this project, he believes he’s designing something that will never be used. However, in the end, not only are these buildings used, but they hold up to hundreds of years of use. In addition, Thurman tells Donald the truth about the nanobots he uses to stay healthy as an older man, but doesn’t tell him the truth about how other countries are building these nanobots to use as weapons against their enemies. In the end, Donald realizes he had all the information he needed to put the truth together, but it came to him in so many pieces that it literally took him hundreds of years to figure it all out.

Thurman is the architect of the world’s destruction via a nuclear strike. He created the crisis that left thousands of people trapped inside Donald’s silos attempting to survive until a time when the world would be inhabitable again. Along with several other men, Thurman not only built these silos but identified the threat against humanity and chose to destroy society in order to save it. Thurman and his coconspirators took it upon themselves to decide who should live and who should die based on a threat that they alone decided couldn’t be dealt with in any other way. This action makes Thurman the novel’s antagonist.

The daughter of Senator Paul Thurman, Anna Thurman is Donald’s former college sweetheart. As an expert in wireless technology, Anna takes a role in the project Donald is heading to design and build an underground bunker for a nuclear waste site that he believes will never be used. He doesn’t try to understand the scope of her work on the project because he assumes that her main role is as Thurman’s daughter and therefore more of a project leader than an active participant. This again illustrates how Donald fails to see what’s right in front of him.

Anna’s love for Donald continues despite his having married another woman, with whom he’s making a life. Although Anna doesn’t show her affection for Donald in overt ways that would cause him to distance himself from her, she manages to trick him into having solo meetings with her as they work on the project. On the day of the National Convention, Anna is with Donald when his attempts to contact his wife via cellphone fail, ostensibly because of overloaded cell towers. Later, when Donald realizes where his wife is, Anna stops him from going to her. All these things add up for Donald later when he finally realizes that Anna actively planned for Donald and his wife to be separated on that day.

Anna appears to have been manipulated and used by her father just like everyone else caught up in Thurman’s web of lies. However, as Donald begins to remember the past more clearly and piece together the puzzle that both Thurman and Anna have laid at his feet, he begins to see that Anna was just as manipulative as her father. Anna used her technical expertise to manipulate Donald, blocking his messages to other members of their project team and messages to his wife at key moments. Anna conspired with another person to have Donald placed in Silo 1 so that when they awoke, the two of them would be together without Donald’s wife present. While Anna’s motives were purer and on a smaller scale than her father’s, she proves herself as manipulative as him. Rather than an antagonist in this story, Anna is a tragic figure used by her father and caught up in a love triangle she thought she could change given time and distance.