Joe Haldeman summarizes this novel thusly: “Camouflage, published in August 2004, is a hard-sf novel about a couple of aliens, a couple of people, a couple of cultures — and the uncoupling of reality from something larger.” I have to say, the last segment of his sentence took a bit of thinking for me to agree with, and while it is true it hardly seems worthy of such a large fraction of the whole.
Haldeman has interesting conceit for this story but I’m not sure he used the best approach to tell it. Two immortal aliens, unknown to each other and apparently from different worlds (we’re only given the origin of one), are able to take human form and change it more or less at will. One has spent eons in the oceans as various forms of aquatic life and comes ashore in California in 1932; one has been around since pre-historical times and can only be human form, he’s been pretty much everything under the sun but in the post-WWII era lives in the US and accumulates a huge fortune.
In 2019 a Navy sub goes down in a deep Pacific trench and during the rescue an Admiral, also a famous oceanographer, discovers an impossible artifact beneath a mature coral reef. A sphere the size of a tank, metallic, so heavy its material density is at least three times that of uranium. The Admiral resigns his commission and partners with the owner of a company which specializes is surfacing large sunken objects and they bring it ashore in Independent Samoa.
Whatever this thing is, it cannot be of human or natural manufacture. The scientists make many attempts to cut off even a tiny piece of it and then try to communicate with it, all unsuccessful until just before the end of the book. I’m not giving a spoiler to say that the object belongs to one of the aliens as Haldeman makes this clear in the opening chapter, but the twist is that the alien doesn’t remember it. Eventually, of course, it does and the two aliens have their only confrontation.
There are three key weaknesses in Camouflage even though its an enjoyable read. First, I think the third person omniscient is the wrong perspective because it removes much of the potential emotional energy. Second, the book alternates between the ‘present day’ (2019-2020, that is) and retelling the adventures of the alien who came ashore in 1932 and, aside from the physical possibilities offered by it’s shapeshifting, has little originality to offer compared to most ‘stranger in a strange land’ stories; as good a writer as Haldeman is, he doesn’t come close here to competing with Heinlein’s novel of that name.
Finally, the climax is tepid. The two aliens briefly tangle, exchange a few barbs, the one who came in the ship says just the right thing and the ship reacts, ending the confrontation. And Haldeman never explains why it happened, other than a short sentence saying the losing alien “obviously shouldn’t be allowed to stay here. We’ll take him home for study.”
Sadly this is the second novel of his I’ve read this year which gets my rating of:
not recommended
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