A Word on Craig Thomas' Mitchell Gant

It is one of the ironies of the military techno-thriller genre that while the form was not only invented by British writers in the nineteenth century but revived by them in the twentieth it is Americans who did best out of that revival--as shown by the career of Tom Clancy.

Still, those British writers were a presence on American bestseller lists for all that, with Craig Thomas no exception, and helped by the fact that he was not only ahead of most of the competition here (1977's Firefox long preceding the aviation-themed stories of Coonts and Brown and the rest, and 1981's Sea Leopard beating Clancy's Hunt for Red October to the punch by many years), but that there were ways in which he tended to outdo them. Others came in ahead of Thomas when it came to the scale and intricacy of scenario, or the scale and elaborateness of the action, or the rigor of their research and knack for blending technical detail with story, but Thomas tended to be the superior storyteller and literary craftsman, with characterization one of the areas where he showed this.

In considering that it may seem natural that Thomas was able to make his spymaster Kenneth Aubrey compelling--as an older man with a long life and career behind him, whose conditions of work in London afford him more opportunity to be "complicated" than the younger people physically engaged out in the field and so apt to have their minds on personal survival above all else. Still, Thomas also managed to make that man out in the field, Mitchell Gant, also an interesting creation.

It seems to me that this was partly because he took a different approach to the character. Clancy's Jack Ryan and company tend to be idealized, often to the point of, as action heroes so often are, appearing to be their creators' Gary Stus (and as a consequence, as genially bland as they are hypercompetent). By contrast, from his first appearance in the original Firefox Gant appears as a deeply damaged and troubled man, burdened not only by what he did, witnessed and suffered in the Vietnam War, but a less than picture-perfect family background in a small town in the middle of nowhere that he had ever since striven to escape. Gant's hatred of his domineering and violent drunk of a father down to the moment when he switched off life support for the man as he lay on his deathbed (the end of "an impatient wait with release and the throwing off of hatred at the end of the tunnel"), his both loving and despising his "untidy slut" of a sister who married a drunk like not-so-dear-old-dad, his disdain for and desire to escape his "roots" in Clarksville rather than romanticism about them (to say nothing of the drug use that played its part in his being shot down, or much, much else in his backstory), were not the sort of thing with which American techno-thrillers were likely to saddle their heroes, or for that matter very prominent in their pictures of America. This, too, had its part in making Gant who he is--an "emotional cripple" in the view of the Air Force's psychological profilers (as he discovered to his distress after breaking into the office containing the records during the war).

Unsurprisingly, in spite of the qualities that permitted him to be so accomplished in the cockpit, he had a less than glamorous post-service life, working as a garage hand (seemingly just a notch above a John Rambo who, as the cinematic version announced in the first film's closing monologue, couldn't even get that job) when he was recruited back into the Air Force for service in the kind of elite unit to which his abilities were of particular value. Also unsurprisingly, he is not a natural "organization man," or always likable, Gant cynical and flippant toward everyone he deals with, both authority and less-experienced colleagues--such that it was easy indeed to picture Clint Eastwood in the role. (In fact reading the third book in the Gant series, 1987's Winter Hawk, I wondered if Eastwood's having played Gant in the 1982 film did not, consciously or unconsciously, encourage Thomas in making Gant hew more closely to the Eastwood persona, and especially Eastwood at his more sneering.)

In considering that it is worth acknowledging that there was no political criticism involved in Thomas' taking a different tack. Going by what I have read of his books Thomas appears a conventional, anti-Communist, anti-Soviet Cold War conservative, and to such a degree that in Firefox he can picture British intelligence seemingly having an easy time finding well-placed Soviets who so hate their government they are ready to lay down their lives to help some foreigners steal a fighter jet from their country (something even the reviewer for the far from radical New York Times had a hard time swallowing). In ways even more pointed the later Sea Leopard gives the impression of a man with little use for leftists, college students and intellectuals. And all the while Thomas consistently appears respectful of security state officialdom and the armed services, and on the whole well disposed to America and Americans in good, "Atlanticist" fashion.*

Still, the fact that Thomas was a Briton writing about a hero of another nationality, and a civilian rather than the veteran most of the techno-thriller writers were writing about an Air Force pilot, may have meant that pieties about the armed forces, American small towns, etc. may have had less grip on him--freeing him to create a complex character, and to good result. Where reading the books by Clancy and company I usually found in the "character stuff" just something to endure until the story got to "the good part" in Thomas' books the character stuff held my interest, and made what I usually thought of as the "good part" better--rather than a gesture toward literary standards on the part of a teller of an action story, just as in David Morrell's First Blood or Robert Ludlum's The Aquitaine Progression the damage and baggage helping to make the adventure of the hero when on the run a fresher, more nuanced, more living, more gripping thing than it would otherwise have been.

* As the Times' Vincent Canby explains, in the film (as in the book) "nearly everyone who assists in the planenapping is promptly bumped off"--killed "in such numbers, and with so little emotion, that even the screenplay seems to become selfconscious about it" to go by Gant's asking his helpers how they can sacrifice their lives like this (with the same sayable of the book, to which the film adaptation was faithful in this as in so many other respects).