Some may think that when I write of Bond as writing a novelized wargame I say this derisively. I do not. The books' emphasis on the "big picture," on the unfolding of their scenario and the movement of the "pieces," was for me their great virtue. In contrast with some of their colleagues the author(s) had no pretense to being Flaubert--and wasted little time trying to interest me in characters who were simply not all that interesting, or impress us with stylistic flourishes (apart from occasional awkward attempts to dramatize reactions by having characters theatrically "shake their heads" or frown in the middle of a train of thought). Bond was astute enough to start his stories with a bang, and get the shooting going in a big way a third of the way in, with the narrative ranging from the councils of government to the skullduggery of spies and commandos and coup plotters, and later, from the frontlines of mechanized battles to dogfights in the air to the bridges of warships, and even events on the "home front" as well. The generally brief scenes changed quickly, and as the above suggests, the techno-military action was plentiful and varied, while the authors made a point of keeping us apprised of the larger situation, adding up to a satisfyingly comprehensive view. In the course of those books I was unlikely to encounter anything quite so over-the-top exciting as, for example, Dale Brown offered at his best, but the Bond-Larkin books were, for me at least, the most consistently and broadly engaging; books that were easy to get into, and which tended to proceed relatively smoothly afterward, avoiding clunkiness and turgidity even as they ran to over five hundred pages in hardcover.
Certainly this characterizes the first of those books. As the title's evocation of Red Storm Rising suggests, this is the most Red Storm Rising-like of the books, with U.S. and South Korean forces battling an invasion of the South by the Soviet-backed North, and the novel offering a wide-field view of the action by land, sea and air as seen through a long list of "dramatis personae" (the authors' own term, in the listing of them he offers at the front of his book). In considering that scenario I think it worth noting that while scenarios of conflict on the Korean peninsula were to become very well-worn, they were still comparatively fresh at the time of his book's release (much more so than Soviet tank armies rolling through the Fulda Gap, or Soviet moves on the Persian Gulf). The scenarios, if never very plausible, was also more so than it would later be, when the North Koreans lost Soviet backing and saw their economy wither, while the South grew only richer, more politically stable, and stronger (one of the world's most industrialized and wealthiest countries, facing off against one of the world's poorest). One result is that as a Red Storm Rising-in-miniature (a major regional conflict rather than a world war-level conflict) it is competently executed, and even comes with a twist ending. Indeed, the comparative ease of following events along, perhaps not unrelated to the more manageable scale of the scenario (recalling Red Storm Rising I realize I understood things at sea and on Iceland well enough, but generally had just a vague idea of things on the ground in Germany as I read my way through), and its relative novelty, meant that even if it did not reach the heights of the big book from 1986 (what here could compare with that earlier novel's Battle of the Atlantic?), I actually liked it better overall.
Still, I find the other two books the Bond-Larkin team produced the more original and striking in their ways. In opting for the rarely utilized setting of southern Africa, Vortex did not simply relocate the familiar U.S.-Soviet clash to a new region, but went for something a bit less familiar and a bit more complex. Here apartheid is on its way out in South Africa, but a senior hardliner, Karl Vorster, schemes his way to a seizure of power he uses to try and turn back the clock, complete with a reconquest of newly independent Namibia. Cuba's Fidel Castro, just as he did when South Africa previously attacked its neighbors, responded by intervening militarily, sending his armed forces to help the Namibians resist the invasion--and drawing Soviet support in after him. This sets in motion what, due to the unwillingness of the U.S. to either back the new South African government, or side with the Cubans in stopping it, becomes a complex, multi-sided game in which the United States aims to prevent both Vorster's victory, and the Soviet bloc's getting the upper hand in the region. Moreover, the novelty and intricacy were complemented by a greater than usual plausibility for the genre (and indeed, probably these authors' best-grounded scenario thus far). At the same time, if I did not usually read Bond's books for their characters, there was a bit more than the usual of such interest here. Vorster and his clique made more than usually memorable villains, while along with the well-wrought geopolitical maneuvering and military action I found myself looking forward to catching up with foreign correspondent Ian Sherfield as he pursued his story on the ground.
The third book, Cauldron, was not quite so original--at least at first glance. It was a fairly straightforward collision of two sides, with the U.S. fighting a plain and simple war to stop an invasion of an ally--or in this case, allies. That the enemy, in this case, was a Franco-German-led "European Confederation" ("Eurcon") may also seem fairly typical of the early '90s, with anxiety about U.S. industrial decline, German reunification, the apparent consolidation of the European Union, and questions about the cohesion of the Western alliance amid the collapse of the Soviet Union and fears of a turn from free trade to neomercantilist trading blocs leading to a spate of U.S. vs. Germany techno-thrillers.
It has to be admitted that the scenario looks rather strained today. Still, apart from displaying their usual competence in handling the techno-military side of things, Bond-Larkin were more sophisticated than any of their colleagues about laying the groundwork. (Indeed, I found myself wondering whether he had not been looking at theories of international politics not normally associated with the genre--the sort of stuff that uses words like "imperialism.") Here the West Europeans, particularly a France and Germany whose going their own way precipitates the collapse of the NATO alliance, turn the newly ex-Communist states of Eastern Europe into semi-colonies, an unstable, uncomfortable arrangement in a situation of deepening trade war, and deepening global economic downturn, which in turn contributes to an influx of refugees from the global South. Callous and exploitative mishandling of the refugee crisis by EurCon triggers a revolt in Hungary against their client government, prompting aggressive military intervention by French forces that soon has them more broadly fighting the Poles, the Czechs, the Slovaks, and then staging an outright invasion of those nations to keep them under Confederation control. The U.S., with what remain to it of its European allies, intervenes to stop their aggression, while EurCon strikes up a deal with Russia (weakened, unstable, but still very heavily armed), raising the risk of things getting even uglier, fast . . .
Of course, things (fortunately) did not work out quite the way laid out in the novel. Still, Bond's greater than usual sensitivity to some of the forces that drive international politics gives the book a greater than usual interest almost thirty years later, especially with a heavily industrialized Germany treating its European "partners" as a periphery, imposing unpopular economic terms from above, and even rearming for the sake of a greater "world role," while trade war resurges and the ultra-right is on the march everywhere.
Afterward, quite naturally, I looked forward to Bond's next book offering something similar, the more so as by that point I had read pretty much all of the books of the '80s and early '90s that had looked promising, and there was not much new material of the type coming out. (In the mid-1990s Stephen Coonts and Harold Coyle were on hiatus, at least where this genre was concerned; Payne Harrison seemed to have moved on; etcetera, etcetera.) However, like their colleagues, Bond and Larkin changed tacks at this point, with the next (and last) two books Bond would write with Larkin (or with anyone for the next decade), following a more conventional course in The Enemy Within.
The Enemy Within was undistinguished by any great originality of premise, or sophistication in establishing it, such as had been so much an asset in the last two books. What it boiled down to was that the Iranians (in spite of what seemed a change of government holding out the hope of better U.S.-Iranian relations) were after control of the Gulf, pure and simple--a well-worn cliché years earlier. And they were contriving to narrow the U.S. edge by tying up American forces at home so as to give them a window of opportunity in which to make their move. (As it happened, Bond's former cowriter Clancy would have a story identical in these details out the same year, Executive Orders, even if the precise means the Iranians used to achieve the end were different.) And by tale's end it proved to be not Red Phoenix-Vortex-Cauldron stuff, but more conventional spies-and-commandos stuff, with an implausible load of melodrama, with the hero and villain having a history culminating in treachery and mortal conflict, and a love story prominent in the narrative's unfolding, and the hero going rogue at the eleventh hour to stop the bad guy who used to be his friend as in so many '80s action movies. Not what I hoped for from Bond and company, it was still a brisk enough read that I was not unentertained, and quickly polished it off, but looked ahead to the next one in the hopes that it would offer a return to the older approach.
Alas, it was a sequel to The Enemy Within, continuing the adventures of that book's heroes, Peter Thorn and Helen Gray, with a scenario that was still more thoroughly standard B-movie, down to the heroes having to go rogue, and stop the villains all by their lonesome, in a raid on the enemy facility in which they go in guns blazing against vastly superior opposition but somehow mow down lots and lots of enemies with their guns as that enemy for some reason can't shoot straight to save their lives (literally). I was not, of course, entirely averse to such, but, again, it was not what I had been hoping for, the more in as this kind of fare was already so much more commonplace than what the Bond-Larkin team used to do, and a Clive Cussler, or Matthew Reilly, did it with more flair, too. Along with the fact that my enthusiasm for the techno-thriller was on the wane, I am not sure that I would have rushed out to pick up Bond's next afterward--but as it was Bond, like so many of his colleagues before him, went on hiatus too. He did not produce another collaboration with Larkin, and indeed, nothing at all for six years. The next novel to appear under Bond's name was the Jim DeFelice-coauthored First Team series, which debuted in 2004, after which Bond began to produce the Jerry Mitchell submarine novels as well (2005). Indeed, the body of Bond-authored or coauthored work in the twenty-first century was, in fact, to become quite considerable (17 novels in 2004-2018, over one a year on average). One was even a sequel to Red Phoenix, 2015's Red Phoenix Burning. They did, undeniably, find readers. Yet, as with so much else in the twenty-first history of the print techno-thriller, in regard to originality, flair, commercial weight and pop cultural impact, it was a mere epilogue to the genre's resurgence in the 1970s, boom in the 1980s, and bust in the 1990s.
No comments:
Post a Comment