Book Review: Icon, by Frederick Forsyth

In The Fist of God Frederick Forsyth presented his first really post-Cold War thriller, in which he gave the 1991 Gulf War the Day of the Jackal treatment by mixing fact and fiction to produce an apparent reconstruction of a "secret history" of a recent event. (In this case it was that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein intended to use the "supergun" that Gerald Bull built for his government to launch the one atomic weapon his nuclear program had managed to produce at the massed ground forces of the Allies on the eve of Desert Storm's land offensive--a scenario that also let Forsyth treat the event in the fashion of a Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller as the protagonists raced to stop the danger.) With his next, Icon, Forsyth took a similar approach, also blending fact and fiction to produce a secret history of recent events--Forsyth specifically combining a dramatization of Aldrich Ames' betrayal of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the spies it was running inside the Soviet Union with those of Forsyth's protagonist, CIA case officer Jason Monck. However, this is only part of the story, and indeed a prelude to the main plot, namely events in a near-future Russia where the continued, calamitous course of the economy, the rising power of the Mafia and the susceptibility of a traumatized and suffering nation to extremist appeals has a Russian ultranationalist on his way to the Kremlin where, going by his leaked secret intentions, he threatens to be nothing less than the Russian Hitler produced by the "Russian Weimar" that was its '90s-era experience (hyperinflation and all by 1999, with the price of a small loaf of bread running to a million rubles). As all this gone on the Secret Service, hands tied by politics, turns to the retired former chief of the organization from The Fourth Protocol, Sir Nigel Irvine, and asks him to do what they cannot--a task that sees him personally enlist the now similarly retired Monck for the job of trading on his old skills to infiltrate Russia as he had repeatedly managed to do during his CIA career to do his bit to stop the would-be Russian Hitler from taking over and threatening world-historical catastrophe.

The blending of fiction and fact, past and present, in the protagonist's side of the story in the first part of the book predictably proves a significant strength. Forsyth displays his usual deftness in the combination (Ames was real, Monck wasn't, but one isn't quite sure where fact leaves off and fiction begins), while the intercutting between Monck's late Cold War career and the development of events in 1999 helps sustain pace and interest. Moreover, if the "brilliant maverick" Monck is less successful as a character than a type (just like Sam McCready in The Deceiver and especially Quinn in The Negotiator, down to his taste for an outdoorsy post-career life far removed from his old career, and his "This time, it's personal" motivation for his return to do the job), Forsyth's taking the trouble to dramatize his past makes his development more than usually substantial. (That dramatization means that we have more than an author's usual and not very meaningful assurance that the "brilliant maverick" is a "brilliant maverick," while we get to see just why "This time, it's personal"--the brutal torture and murder of four of the agents Monck ran inside Russia, people he made promises to and who trusted him as he used them and in the end failed to protect them by a KGB officer who is now the would-be Russian Hitler's right-hand man, Anatoli Grishin.) All of this works again to Forsyth's advantage in Part Two of the book as, displaying his usual command of thriller mechanics (with his economy with prose and use of changes of scene in particular helping him to keep the pace brisk and the course suitably filled with twists and menace), Monck calls in an old debt to position himself to outmaneuver his foes. Forsyth has most of it play out in relatively grounded fashion, but Forsyth also does not disappoint where the more melodramatic requirements of a "This time, it's personal" story are concerned, not least in the action-packed finale.

Unfortunately the development of the crisis in Russia that is the occasion for Monck's mission, Forsyth's explanation of which is central to his maneuverings, is rather less impressive. Those who write about Forsyth are much more apt to commend his research than fault it, especially where his world-view is at issue. However, Forsyth's world-view certainly does matter to his fiction, if in some stories more than others, with Forsyth's particularly nasty treatment of the protests against the nuclear arms race and the British left more generally as Soviet dupes or worse certainly relevant to The Fourth Protocol. It is if anything even more the case here, given that this is a story not of stopping an assassination or a bombing, but an attempt to, faced with a profound crisis of society and state, manipulate events in that society to achieve a particular outcome.

In treating of the Soviet Union and the Russia which emerged from it what Forsyth has been prone to the one-dimensional Cold Warrior view of these matters (expressed with particular stridency, I might add). Consistent with this, in considering Russia's '90s-era situation Forsyth holds that this was a matter of the combination of Communism's inherent extreme decrepitude, the virulence of the Mafia that was the only thing in the system that displayed any efficiency--he can seem here to echo his fellow rabid Cold Warrior Edward Luttwak's silly suggestion of a Nobel Prize in Economics for the Russian Mafia--and the way it completely took over the country afterward. (The combination of rapacity and ideological insanity of the nomenklatura during a bungled reform process that from the top down devastated the sick but still massive industry the Soviets managed to build up, the role of brutal and criminal oligarchs far outside the circles ordinarily characterized as "Mafia," and how the prices of Russian export commodities the more important to the economy with industry being devastated were in the toilet--Forsyth acknowledges none of this as part of the story when lecturing the reader on the situation.) The problem being quite as simple as that it is easy enough for a suitable Russian leader to deal with it, all as Forsyth's Old Tory convictions run into overdrive where getting such a leader is concerned. Thus Sir Nigel, obliged to work outside government channels but not Establishment channels (Forsyth has great faith in the latter even when he has little in the former), turns to his fellow "elder statesmen" in the Anglo-American "Council of Lincoln" (Forsyth does not hesitate to name-drop here, mentioning among others, George H.W. Bush, James Baker, Henry Kissinger, Margaret Thatcher and Evelyn de Rothschild) to get their sanction for the organization of a reactionary counter-revolution to stop the fascist counter-revolution in which they persuade the conservative elements in Russian society (the church, the army, the bankers) to back a restoration of throne and altar, with a certain Prince of the House of Windsor as the new Czar of All the Russias providing a symbol for the country to unite behind (implicitly, Prince Michael of Kent, ironic as this may seem today), because if they can do that somehow all the rest will fall into place.

It is telling that what most would consider the stuff of conspiracy theory--ex-Presidents and Prime Ministers sitting together with the head of a certain legendary banking family and like business figures in their luxurious private club to decide the government of the "lesser breeds"--is just dandy in Forsyth's view, and indeed he presents it as a principled defense of "democracy" in the world (for of course, such people have never had any other motive in all their lives of Public Service, perish the thought), all while brushing off any possibility that a person of genuinely democratic sentiment might see an "issue" in a tale of secret elite groups imposing monarchy on a country through covert action that will eventually involve a lot of killing of people who never had a say in the matter in democracy's name, then when it is all done sitting back in self-satisfaction at how they pulled the strings. (Indeed, remembering Forsyth's seeming to channel Robert Ludlum for a while back in The Negotiator I could not help remembering that this was the sort of thing villainous organizations like Genessee and Inver Brass do in his books, not the good guys.)

The big picture in Icon all pretty much pure wish-fulfillment for Forsyth the Right-Wing Ideologue, it makes quite the contrast with the realities of this "It's the Economy, Stupid" world we live in, such that where in many a prior book one didn't have to buy into Forsyth's view of the world to find his storytelling gripping them this one became increasingly flimsy as the outline of the scheme became clearer. And if anything the results have probably come to look weaker with time, for, far from us now reading it and feeling as if we could be looking at a piece of "secret history" the way we might when reading The Deceiver, we know full well that not only did matters not work out that way, but that their ever having done so is exceedingly unlikely. (After all, if Russia, and the world, seem very far from any sort of "Happily ever after" to the tale of the Cold War's end, the country's stabilization happened on very different lines--resurgent commodity prices, and the measure of success the Russian government had in using them, giving the country a respite, all before this unhappy century proved to have still more troubles in store for the eight billion of us walking the surface of this third rock from the sun.) Indeed, by the time the inevitable adaptation of the book happened (in the TV movie version made by a then-very different Hallmark Channel with Michael York as Sir Nigel, and Patrick Swayze as Jason Monck), the story already seemed badly dated, way back in 2005, to such a degree that the original plot is almost unrecognizable in the goings-on.