Book Review: The Negotiator, by Frederick Forsyth

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Reading Frederick Forsyth's The Negotiator I quickly found myself in mind of that author's '70s-era novels, particularly The Day of the Jackal, and The Odessa File. Jackal was a sprawling "security state epic" of the kind Forsyth made his name helping to popularize--a tale ranging widely as it "reconstructs" for us in journalistic fashion a fictional (or is it?) national security crisis with an eye to giving us the big picture of the situation and its unfolding rather than following a protagonist through their personal story arc. (Indeed, the character we would conventionally regard as the hero of the piece, the detective put in charge of the hunt for the Jackal, doesn't even show until the middle of the book.) By contrast Odessa was a more conventional thriller, much more tightly focused on its hero's quest (which by story's end proves very personal indeed).

Meanwhile, just like Forsyth's two preceding international thrillers, The Devil's Alternative and The Fourth Protocol, The Negotiator is a Jackal-type national security epic staged at a global level for its first eighty pages (I'm going by the pagination in my paperback edition) as it ranges from Washington to Moscow and beyond in following the U.S. President's effort to sign an historic arms control treaty with the Soviet Union, and the elements on both sides of the Iron Curtain which, seeing in the treaty a threat to their interests, mobilize to prevent that treaty from ever being inked. After page eighty, following a kidnapping implicitly connected with these machinations, and the enlistment of the titular "negotiator" who is supposed to secure the kidnap victim's release, the man we know as Quinn, the story turns a lot more like Odessa--centering on the activity of the protagonist as Forsyth shoves the big geopolitical maneuverings into the background, and afterward offers only brief glimpses of them, mostly from the margins for quite a while as the security state epic turns into a police procedural. After the key twist at the midpoint of the book shifts mode yet again, so that the results felt less like Forsyth, and more like Robert Ludlum, especially after the crucial twist midway through that shortly gives us an American in bad odor with the authorities who, looking to clear his name by unmasking the conspirators into whose affairs he had unknowingly been drawn, travels Western Europe looking for answers to his questions from people who, every so often, are dead before he gets to them, as other people take shots at him as well. (And just as in Ludlum, yes, the trail will lead back to very powerful figures in his own country, all as during Quinn's foray into the mountains of Corsica I practically had to check the name on the cover to make sure of which author's book I was reading.)

The shifts from epic treatment of international intrigue to police procedural to Ludlumesque adventure make for a less ingeniously constructed and less fluid read than its predecessors. Indeed, Forsyth's abruptly ceasing to follow the higher-level action in the early part of the book made me impatient (during a prior read, to the point of putting the book down and coming to it only a long time after), the more in as this phase of the tale is a slow starter, Forsyth taking another eighty pages before the negotiator even makes contact with the kidnappers to do any negotiating. At the same time the more focused, protagonist-centered narrative makes more problematic the fact that characterization is neither Forsyth's interest nor forte--it seems relevant that his first, most famous, arguably most influential thriller had for its titular anti-hero a cipher--and indeed, Quinn rather an action hero cliché. (Of course the specialist is a "brilliant maverick" who insists on "doing things his way" leading to endless annoyances with the jobbing cops, and a relationship of mutual disrespect between them. Of course when "not on assignment" the ex-special forces man leads a bucolic existence in a locale where he has plenty of tough guy friends who can watch his back. And so forth.) Moreover, at the level of the plot Forsyth's usage of a small group-staged security incident as the key to a superpower-level crisis here proves less clever and less tension-filled than his linking of the hijacking of a supertanker to a looming threat of World War III in The Devil's Alternative (with, indeed, the revelation of the villains' rationale for employing the kidnapping as a tool for achieving their ends in this case underwhelming).

Still, if the story is an unlikely blend of elements that are in at least some cases repetitions of past successes, or simply derivative, and the tale's interest sags for a stretch early on, Forsyth's mechanics are on the whole sufficiently competent to make the book work, with his propensity for short scenes, plain and economical prose and sense of pace helping carry the narrative--with his channeling Ludlum working surprisingly well. This also wasn't the only surprise the book had to offer, with Forsyth's numbering American oil men, arms manufacturers and intelligence veterans among the conspirators an unexpected move given his prior efforts, and well-known politics (which have him pausing in his storytelling to put in an entirely gratuitous good word for an unnamed female Prime Minister we all know to be Margaret Thatcher). Indeed, Forsyth turns a satirical eye on the particular "flavor" of right-wing represented by a racist religious megalomaniac like Cyrus Miller or a Senator Bennett Hapgood who equate their private interests (and fanaticisms) with the "national interest," while making their ex-CIA henchman a sadistic pervert whose association with the Phoenix program and the covert war in Nicaragua in the '80s puts neither of those campaigns in a good light here--all of which makes Forsyth's hero's working with the Soviet system's saner elements to stop the conspirators threatening the world with disaster the more striking a choice. Meanwhile, if the political premise of this near-the-end-of-the-Cold War tale by Forsyth was quickly overtaken by the rapidly unfolding changes of those days (in the 1989 novel the Soviet bloc is not just a going concern but still intact in 1991-1992), there can seem to be something of the post-Cold War in the collision of geopolitics and oil at the heart of the book's plot--and some, I imagine, will incline to the view that history has unfolded in a manner not too different from how it would have had the villains in the book succeeded.