Originally Published in THE FIX, January 1, 2008 One of the most popular games in international relations has always been "Guess the Next Global Heg...
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Scarecrow Returns is Reilly's first Shane Scofield novel since Scarecrow (2003), almost eight years earlier, and naturally I was looking forward to it. When I heard about this novel's premise, though, I had some doubts. It felt like a return to his o...more
Scarecrow Returns is Reilly's first Shane Scofield novel since Scarecrow (2003), almost eight years earlier, and naturally I was looking forward to it. When I heard about this novel's premise, though, I had some doubts. It felt like a return to his older books (like Ice Station), which I'd enjoyed, but which he seemed to have moved past to more complex stories (like Scarecrow and the Jack West books). Additionally, two decades after the Cold War's end the idea of a Soviet superweapon would seem to have passed its "sell-by" date – much as has long become the case with villains left over from the Third Reich - while I wasn't sure what to make of the "Army of Thieves" who comprised the villains, these seeming to be an especially senseless bunch.
Fortunately, the book exceeded my expectations in all these areas. Like the books of "Reilly 1.0" (as Reilly himself refers to his earlier work), Scarecrow Returns is a three-way collision between teams of special-forces soldiers at a high-tech facility in a remote, hostile landscape, but Reilly manages to keep the material fresh, and the plot and action unfold with a smoothness reflecting his now lengthy experience in telling this kind of tale. The battles are as readable as any Reilly has written (at least, when read with the aid of the numerous illustrations), while being as grand in scale and over-the-top as readers have come to expect – which is to say, unequaled by any writer working similar territory today. Reilly's particular variant on the trope of the "left-over Soviet superweapon now on the loose" is a good one, and his villain is in line with his predecessors, at least, when we get behind the mask. The novel also benefits from a number of new touches, ranging from a scene-stealing combat robot named Bertie, to a French vendetta against our hero – and a few memorable plot twists (which I won't spoil here). Additionally, cartoonish as Reilly's characters are, the characterizations are nonetheless a bit fuller and more nuanced here, and their personalities do have a bearing on the tale.
That is not to say that everything is perfect. Reilly is as casual as ever about the technical detail (as in his descriptions of the KH-12 satellite and SS-23 missile), and the editing falters a bit in one of the early action sequences. Such nit-picks aside, Reilly's use of his over-the-top plot to explore a real geopolitical issue struck me as less clever this time around, the rationale behind the action comparatively muddled, especially when compared with the almost psychic perceptiveness of the villain. Still, on the whole it's a very satisfying read if you're up for this kind of adventure, and fans of previous books are likely to find it well worth their time. However, given the extent to which events in the previous novels bear on the story in Scarecrow Returns, readers new to the series might want to check out the previous installments first.(less)
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In its basic structure, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy resembles Le Carre's previous spy novel, 1968's A Small Town in Germany. Like that book, it centers on an ungainly outsider (in this case, George Smiley, now an outsider by virtue of his retirement...more
In its basic structure, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy resembles Le Carre's previous spy novel, 1968's A Small Town in Germany. Like that book, it centers on an ungainly outsider (in this case, George Smiley, now an outsider by virtue of his retirement) who is brought in to investigate a community of British civil service officials who appear to have been compromised (in this case, senior officials of the "Circus," one of whom may be a Soviet mole). That investigation, primarily intellectual and psychological rather than physical (not much in the way of black bag stuff or action here), has the protagonist digging into the pasts of the people he is scrutinizing to extract the truth in spite of them – rather like a psychiatrist talking out an issue with a resistant patient.
The combination of Le Carre's dense, oblique style with Smiley's often tortuous path (and the greater length of this work, his longest up to that time) does not make for an easy read. It demands a great deal of close attention and patience on the reader's part. However, Le Carre displays a stronger knack for telling this kind of story the second time around; bewildering as the book may sometimes seem the mystery ultimately proves logical, and clever; and just as one might expect from this author, his highly atmospheric tale offers a sense of genuine human drama generally absent from flashier spy stories.
Tinker is also noteworthy as the opening of Le Carre's famous "Karla" trilogy (the other two books in which are The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People).(less)
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State of Siege is the story of an engineer winding up a job in the imaginary Sunda republic. Before he can fly out he gets trapped in the capital by a rebel attack, and forced to navigate the intrigues that follow.
After the early chapters it is a bit...more
State of Siege is the story of an engineer winding up a job in the imaginary Sunda republic. Before he can fly out he gets trapped in the capital by a rebel attack, and forced to navigate the intrigues that follow.
After the early chapters it is a bit short on the humor characteristic of Ambler's best work, but the book is engaging throughout, and in its treatment of the battle for the capital, anticipated the military techno-thriller.(less)
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Eric Ambler's career, famous for its reinvention of the spy genre, appropriately enough began with a spoof of the field. In this one, a physicist in need of a good vacation reads a bad thriller and after hitting his head in the course of a car accide...more
Eric Ambler's career, famous for its reinvention of the spy genre, appropriately enough began with a spoof of the field. In this one, a physicist in need of a good vacation reads a bad thriller and after hitting his head in the course of a car accident, believes himself to be superspy Conway Carruthers – just before he is swept up in a genuine intrigue surrounding a nuclear weapons program in a small Balkan country.
The premise is hokey, and a bit after the midpoint the story seemed to me to read more like the stories it was playing off of than a parody of them, but on the whole Dark Frontier holds up surprisingly well, long after many of the writers he parodied (like E. Phillips Oppenheim) have passed into obscurity.(less)
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Ambler's novels typically begin with his protagonist agreeing to something that seems harmless enough to be worth a shot, but soon turns out to be massively stupid. This time around an American tourist couple get caught up in an arms deal in early Co...more
Ambler's novels typically begin with his protagonist agreeing to something that seems harmless enough to be worth a shot, but soon turns out to be massively stupid. This time around an American tourist couple get caught up in an arms deal in early Cold War Southeast Asia. There is a tendency to slight Ambler's later works, but for me this one ranks among his very best (and certainly funniest).(less)
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As Washington Post book reviewer Patrick Anderson notes at the start of his book, thrillers have largely replaced genres like the historical epic, the family saga and stories of the rich and famous (books like James Michener and Harold Robbins and Ja...more
As Washington Post book reviewer Patrick Anderson notes at the start of his book, thrillers have largely replaced genres like the historical epic, the family saga and stories of the rich and famous (books like James Michener and Harold Robbins and James Clavell used to write) on our bestseller lists – and this book promises to tell how that happened.
Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed by what it delivered, for two principal reasons. The first is that the title implied a portrait of the transformation of American culture (or at least of publishing) during the past half-century. The broad cultural history, the sociology required for that just aren't there.
The second is that Anderson's discussion of the thriller struck me as overly narrow. While the title seems to me something of a misnomer, the book lives up only too fully to the implication in the subtitle, specifically in its focus on crime fiction, the only branch of the thriller that gets anything like comprehensive treatment. By contrast, spy novels, legal thrillers and military "techno-thrillers" (a term Anderson himself coined in a 1988 article on Tom Clancy) each get a bit of patchy attention, and many other subgenres - such as the Michael Crichton-style scientific thriller, the Robin Cook-style medical thriller, and with few exceptions, the action-adventure thriller (let alone anything more likely to be labeled speculative fiction, though it very regularly operates in the thriller mode) - are all but ignored. Additionally, particularly after the introductory discussion of the genre's history from Poe to noir in the first four chapters, Anderson's personal likes and dislikes (he prefers stylishly written, character-oriented thrillers with a tone of gritty realism or dark zaniness) increasingly dominate the bulk of the narrative.
Nonetheless, Triumph did give me an introduction to a fair bit of pop culture history I knew only dimly, and a good many authors I knew nothing about. There is a lot of summary of key works here, but Anderson's writing is always lucid, brisk and highly readable. Additionally, when doing more than retelling stories, Anderson is an astute critic, quite conscious of the silliness of so much thriller convention (the detectives whose brilliant deductions are just a combination of the obvious with wild guess disguised as intuitive leaps; the routine involvement of P.I.s in murder investigations), and also of genre politics (Anderson commenting on the challenges confronting a would-be liberal thriller writer). By and large, his criticism is also persuasive, at least where I've been in a position to judge the works in question for myself (as in his writing about Tom Clancy). Anderson also has a good eye for relevant trivia (seeing in the success of James Patterson, a highly successful adman, the embodiment of "the belief that you can sell books the way you sell dog food"). The result is that rather than the epic history promised, the reader gets a number of sketches of major authors out of thriller history inside a hodgepodge of observations and comments, which offered just enough of interest to have been worth my while in the end.(less)
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Toby Young's second, equally brilliantly titled memoir, starts off after How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has got into print. It happens to catch the eye of a Hollywood producer who offers him a crack at adapting a biography about a self-destr...more
Toby Young's second, equally brilliantly titled memoir, starts off after How to Lose Friends and Alienate People has got into print. It happens to catch the eye of a Hollywood producer who offers him a crack at adapting a biography about a self-destructive '70s-era record producer into a screenplay for a movie he wants to make, while a a different set of producers comes around to talk about making his first book into a movie. Once again, he's in America going after the Big Time, albeit on the West coast rather than the East.
It would be a mistake to approach this book as Toby's Big Hollywood Adventure, however. No Hands Clapping is really a chronicle of his life after the events of the previous book, with his screenwriting experiences just the connecting thread running through the narrative. It doesn't help that the freshness of the reader's first encounter with him is gone, or that he's lost some of his edge.
Toby still has ambitions, but the fire's not as hot as when he hopped across the Atlantic to work for Graydon Carter. The tensions and conflicts that did so much to make the original book interesting for me - the contrast between his intelligence and education and his starstruck hunger for glamour, his frustrated lust for the good life, the clash between his rather shallow goals and his parents' accomplishments and values – are far less in evidence here, having largely run their course the last time around. Toby's settling down at the end of the last book is a significant part of that, and as might be guessed, his life as a "whipped" (but mostly content) boyfriend, husband and father coping with domestic and mid-life crises is rather less entertaining than his earlier laddishness. He's still quite good at "losing friends and alienating people," but it starts to feel like a role he's basking in.
The result is that this all seems more like an anticlimax to the history that made him an "icon of defeat" rather than a fully satisfactory follow-up. Still, there were some of the funny bits and worthwhile insights that helped make the first book memorable.(less)
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4.00 avg rating — 3 ratings
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published
2011
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