Craig Thomas' Snow Falcon: Some Reflections

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

As I have remarked in prior posts one of the most striking aspects of Craig Thomas' Snow Falcon was the extent to which Thomas had moved beyond the Cold War propaganda-caricature of Firefox in his conception of the Soviet Union. This is not simply a matter of his giving a little more thought to his characterizations of the Soviet figures, or his depiction of the society they inhabit (such as I have already discussed in Winter Hawk, even if this book goes further that way), but the fundamentals of the thriller plot itself, which offered quite a few surprises. Consider the impression the description of the book one is likely to find on the back cover of the paperback or the relevant page on the retail site makes--references to Thomas' longtime hero Secret Service chief Kenney Aubrey, photos suggestive of Soviet military moves in the vicinity of Finland, the infiltration of British special forces soldier Alan Folley to check out what is going amid an emerging crisis threatening nothing less than global catastrophe by way of a combination of coup d'etat in Moscow, and military aggression in Scandinavia which NATO is bound to resist.

Standard stuff, even the idea of the British cooperating with not just the Americans but Soviets to save the day.

However, as quickly becomes clear when one actually reads the book, the role of the Soviets is not marginal this time around--extending a hand to Aubrey, Folley and company as they play the principal role in saving the day. Indeed, senior KGB operative Alexei Vorontsyev becomes very prominent this time around in the first chapters, not only as a factor in these events but as a fully realized character living within a society with a more or less normal daily life (not least, in a failing marriage that can seem an all too common story anywhere, all of which soon proves more than mere background detail). By the midpoint of the book he actually emerges as the protagonist of the story, all as that British soldier checking out Soviet activity on the Finnish border gets captured, and lost to sight. Indeed, where in a conventional, jingoistic Cold War thriller Folley would play Rambo, escaping to finish his mission, it is Vorontsyev who does so--evading pursuit, fighting off enemies (in one case singlehandedly taking out most of an army squad and hijacking their armored personnel carrier for the purposes of his getaway), and actually rescuing Folley, who is not a triumphant action hero now ready to take the lead, but a man broken by the villains' torture, who in his damaged, degraded, pitiable condition (an astonishing counterpoint to the cult that was then growing up around Folley's Special Air Service) can help only with the clues he can give regarding the man behind the plot, to whom he was presented while in captivity. Naturally it is Vorontsyev and not Folley who personally hunts down the man, confronting him face to face.

Just as we have an interesting switch pulled on us with respect to the hero, so do we have one pulled with the villains. In the West the conventional idea is that no honest, intelligent, person could possibly have ever believed in the Bolshevik Revolution, let alone still been loyal to it in 1980. Indeed, looking at the mutiny on the Soviet destroyer Storozhevoy in 1975 Western intelligence was sure that what had been happening was an attempted defection--a reading that was the inspiration for Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October (who had read Gregory Young's Naval Academy master's thesis on the event). However, as it turned out the mutiny was not against the Revolution, but an attempt to save a revolution being betrayed by the Soviet elite led by ship political officer Valery Sablin--and especially in hindsight that the possibility was so little regarded by Western analysts can seem to testify to the intensity of Anti-Communist prejudice, and how it muddled the thinking of those whose job it literally was to understand the Soviet bloc for the purposes of fighting the Cold War. Yet such an attempt to save the revolution is what we ultimately see here--the plotter that Vorontsyev ultimately hunts down an old man who remembered Lenin, and had never ceased to be devoted to it, and regarded Stalin as having betrayed it--with the policy of "socialism in one country" that has, along with the reign of police terror with which Stalinism has been identified ever since, limited, twisted and threatened to destroy what Lenin and his allies sought to achieve, leaving us with a more than usually complex sense of this figure, the history he lived through, his world.*

Just as it seems to me that Thomas was ahead of Clancy in imagining the submarine scenario of Sea Leopard, he can seem ahead of Clancy in being able to consider such a possibility as that--and in the rather full-bodied development of a fairly conventional Cold War thriller premise, made what could have been standard a surprising and more than usually nuanced, richer, work.

* Thomas does not refer to the plotter as a Trotskyite, but this was, of course, a major Trotskyite criticism, and indeed we see the assassination of Trotsky in Mexico recalled by him as part of Stalin's catalog of crimes.