A Word on Craig Thomas' Soviet Characters

Big-screen film adaptations of successful books, especially when they are major feature films of the summer blockbuster type, are famously unfaithful to their source material. However, Clint Eastwood's adaptation of Craig Thomas' novel Firefox was very faithful--with that faithfulness extending to what many might be inclined to see as the book's flaws.

Worth considering here is what the New York Times' Vincent Canby said of the movie, which is just as sayable of the book--that the film "expresses a most cavalier attitude toward the lives of its supporting characters," with all those who aid Mitchell Gant in stealing the Firefox fighter jet killed off "in such numbers, and with so little emotion, that even the screenplay seems to become selfconscious about it," Acknowledging the fact itself. Thus a Gant bewildered by the readiness of the helpers that British intelligence recruited to lay down their lives this way comes out and asks one of them what motivates them--and in the film the answer he gets is that "'It's a small thing compared to my resentment of the K.G.B..'"

All of this may have been congenial to those taking a hard-liner's view of the Cold War, but as this reviewer for the by no means radical New York Times makes clear, it was as unsatisfying dramatically as it was implausible in this more complex reality. And as it happened, Thomas' handling of his Soviet characters in his subsequent books, like the Firefox sequels, increasingly moved past the anti-Communist cliché that dominated the first book, in 1983's Firefox Down, and still more 1987's Winter Hawk. If still not the deepest, most-nuanced or well-balanced picture of Soviet life, here the Soviet Union at least appears a place where, for all the imperfections of their system, there is, just as in Gant's own less-than-perfect Clarksville, a normal, daily life, in which people have families and all their baggage, and personal affections and antipathies, which figure significantly in the elaborate intrigues that play out among the Soviet leadership (and how Gant endeavors to get back out of the Soviet Union again after having got himself into it), Thomas managing to generate some real personal tension here out of the interactions of the Soviet principals in a way novels like these rarely manage to do (the Soviet general in charge of the space-based laser program, his ruthless and ambitious subordinate, the KGB man dogging them), and the book better off for it.