The President is missing: Bill Clinton and
James Patterson
Plot
The novel opens with the commander in chief, President Duncan,
preparing for a House select committee. His staff has strongly advised him
against testifying. “My opponents really hate my guts,” Duncan thinks, but
“here I am”: just one honest man “with rugged good looks and a sharp sense of
humor.” Facing a panel of sniveling political opportunists intent on impeaching
him, Duncan knows he sounds “like a lawyer” caught in “a semantic legal debate,” but darn it, he’s trying to save the United States! Although
Congress insists he explain exactly what he’s been up to, he can’t reveal the
details of his secret negotiations with a terrorist set on destroying the
country.
As a fabulous revision of Clinton’s own life and
impeachment scandal, this is dazzling. The
transfiguration of William Jefferson Clinton into Jonathan Lincoln Duncan
should be studied in psych departments for years. Both men lost their fathers
early and rose from hardscrabble circumstances to become governors. Both men
met their brilliant wives in law school, and both couples have one daughter.
But then we come to the curious differences: Rather
than shrewdly avoiding military service, President Duncan is a celebrated war
hero. Rather than being pleasured in the Oval Office by an intern, Duncan was
tortured in Iraq by the Republican Guard. And rather than being the subject of
innumerable rumors about extramarital affairs, Duncan was wholly devoted to his
late wife and now lives in apparent celibacy.
Even incidental details provide weird echoes of the
Clinton era: Duncan’s closest adviser is a woman publicly branded by a crude
reference to oral sex.
But onward! After all, this is, at least partially,
a James Patterson book, and soon we’re crashing through his famous two-page
chapters. The whole 500-page novel takes place in just a
few days as a terrorist named Suliman Cindoruk plots to activate a computer
virus devised by a beautiful Abkhazian separatist with a hard, agile body and a
“voracious appetite for exploration, in the world of cyberwarfare and in the
bedroom.” Her virus has infected every server, computer and electronic device
in America.
In a matter of hours, the country’s financial, legal
and medical records will be erased; the transportation and electrical grids
will crash. Hungry and Twitterless, without access to porn, fake news or Joyce
Carol Oates’s cat photos, America will be plunged into the Dark Ages.
Only one handsome man can stop this, but it’s not easy for the
president of the United States to slip out of the White House and foil
international terrorists, particularly with those congressmen hot on his tail,
intent on impeachment. Fortunately, Duncan gets some makeup help from an actress
who is “one of the twenty most beautiful women on the planet.” A little beard
stubble, some quick work with an eyebrow pencil and — voila: The leader of the free world is ready to go
underground and defend Western civilization.
And as we zoom through these chapters, it’s easy to
tell which author is holding the reins. Sometimes, the pages spark to DEFCON 1
with spectacular shootouts, car crashes, Viper helicopters and a pregnant
assassin code-named Bach who “is known only by her gender and the classical-music
composer she favors.”
Nayakgiri Comments
Title does not make sense. We always know where
president is as it is narrated by president himself. So we
always know his whereabouts. When we pick up a thriller we expect lot of
action. Clinton lacks that action and speed. For eg thrills are limited to
giving us Cabinet members questioning each other over Skype. President Duncan
spends an awful lot of time consulting with world leaders. He lectures at us
about the proper function of government and the responsibilities of NATO.
Several segments read like little admonitions to current president.
The Scope of
the Novel is cramped. Author’s over belief in pervasiveness of IOT (Internet of
Things) is futuristic. There’s no thrum of national panic, no sense of the wide
world outside this very literal narrative. And so much of the plot is stuck in
a room with nerds trying to crack a computer code. That struggle feels about as
exciting as watching your parents trying to remember their Facebook password:
“Did you spell it with an O? Did you try a
capital letter?”
The Fox By Frederick Forsyth
Plot:
The novel’s two main
characters could hardly be more different. Sir Adrian Weston is a 70-year-old
retired senior British intelligence official who remains influential because
Prime Minister Marjory Graham trusts him. Sir Adrian is the novel’s brains,
conscience and hero.
The other lead character
is Luke Jennings, an 18-year-old who sports an unruly mop of blond curls and
suffers from a severe case of Asperger’s syndrome. At the outset, Luke lives
with his parents in a modest house in a London suburb where he spends most of
his time in the attic on his computer. Luke has somehow developed an
inexplicable ability to break through computer defenses. That gift is the
spring of Forsyth’s novel.
One day, astonished American
security officials discover that their most secret databases, long thought
impregnable, have been hacked by an intruder who stole nothing, just looked
around and withdrew. An intensive investigation identifies Luke as the culprit.
In a White House
confrontation, the president — Donald Trump — demands that Luke be handed over
for trial and imprisonment. But Sir Adrian insists that the boy can be more
useful in London by gaining access to supposedly impenetrable databases in
Iran, North Korea and Russia. Luke proceeds to break through those nations’
most elaborate defenses to extract priceless intelligence, often about nuclear
plans.
Forsyth’s story includes
scathing descriptions of several world leaders. In his discussion of North
Korea’s nuclear capacity, Forsyth describes the nation’s leader, Kim Jong Un,
as “fat, ugly, insisting on a bizarre haircut” and warns that his “ruthlessness
is total, his obsession with himself absolute.”
Sir Adrian warns the prime minister that the supposed North Korean
denuclearization is a scam — that if they have destroyed one nuclear facility
they have simply hidden another one elsewhere. She asks why Trump would fall
for such a ruse. Because, he says, he “lusts to be awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize. So the desire to believe is triumphant.”
Forsyth is even less
flattering to Vladimir Putin, whom he describes as “a cold-eyed little former
secret- police thug” and mass murderer who has colluded with Russian gangsters
and oligarchs (often the same people) to make himself possibly the richest man
in the world. Forsyth also portrays Putin as determined to return Russia to the
prominence it enjoyed under Joseph Stalin.
Sir Adrian warns that
Putin will try to dominate Europe not with nuclear weapons but with Russia’s
vast resources of natural gas and a complex series of pipelines capable of
supplying most of the continent. He tells the prime minister: “Russia has now
pinned all her hopes on swamping Western Europe with her natural gas and thus
becoming, through our energy dependence, our effective masters.”
The pipelines are controlled by
computers, so perhaps England can call upon its secret weapon, Luke Jennings,
to foil the plan.
Putin sends Russia’s most lethal
sniper — known only as Misha — to England to eliminate the troublesome
teenager. Forsyth compares Misha to Vasily Zaitsev, the legendary Russian
sniper who in snow-blanketed Stalingrad in winter 1942 was
credited with eliminating hundreds of German soldiers.
But can Misha find Luke?
Or can Sir Adrian protect the boy and preserve world peace? The outcome is
exciting, surprising and satisfying.
Luke’s ability to defeat
computer codes is never clarified. He’s called a “cybergenius” with a
“bewildering” skill, but his genius can’t be explained because it’s a gimmick,
pure and simple. But it’s one we accept because he’s on our side, it’s fun and
the rest of the book is so deeply rooted in reality.
Nayakgiri
Comments
In 1971, Frederick Forsyth, then
a freelance reporter in need of cash, published his first novel, “The Day of the Jackal.” His tale of a plot to
assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle won international success and
established Forsyth as one of the world’s premier spy novelists.
Now, at age 80, Forsyth has
published his 17th novel, “The Fox.” It is in one regard an odd tale, but it’s also ingenious,
expertly written and a serious look at international conflicts that threaten
the future of the world.
As a teenager and young professional I thrived on
these international plots, venues, conspiracy theories, spies, high tech,
twists and turns in plots. As we turned mature we felt sense of being driven by
megalomanias ambitions intertwined with individual aspirations and rightful
place in scheme of things. Forsyth catered to that. Later when we actually travelled to places
learned hard realities of life all that heroism is lost for mundane achievements.
But then as master went into kind of reclusion with an occasional novels like Afghan
and Kill list in post-cold war era , I missed him a lot till The Fox.
Forsyth is supremely
well-informed about world affairs, politics, diplomacy, weaponry and the
mysteries of spycraft. In “The Fox,” as in all his novels, he lays them out in
brilliant detail. Young Luke is the icing on the cake.
The Reckoning by John Grisham
Plot
In 1946, months after returning home to Mississippi
from fighting in the Philippines, decorated war hero Pete Banning strolls into
the local church and shoots pastor Dexter Bell dead. Even when facing the
electric chair, he won't say why he murdered his old friend.
Did it have something to do with word that in Pete's
absence his wife, Liza, was seen with Bell, who was known for straying from his
marriage? Liza, who three years before her husband's shocking return had been
traumatized by a notification that he was missing in action and presumed dead,
is in no condition to answer any questions. She is in the state mental hospital,
where Pete, head of a prominent farm family in Clanton, got her committed for
iffy reasons after his homecoming. Brutally tortured by the Japanese, he
himself appears to be in a reduced mental state. This being a Grisham (The
Rooster Bar, 2017, etc.) novel, we spend a fair amount of time in the
courtroom, first with the insistently tight-lipped Pete's trial and then after
Bell's widow files a wrongful death suit against Pete's family that stands to
wipe them out. As usual, Grisham does a solid job of portraying a Southern town
at a particular moment in time, touching upon social issues as he goes. But the
book never overcomes the hole at its center. It's one thing to create a
character who is a mystery to those around him, quite another to reveal next to
nothing about that character to the reader. After a while, Pete's one-note act
becomes a bit of a drag.
NayakGiri Comments:
Grisham' entertaining wartime novel is not lacking
in ambition or scope, but the spark of imagination that would grease its pages
is largely missing. The courtroom drama is missing for long uninteresting
sequence of events. War stories in Phillipines are predicatble as its not Grisham
territory. There is whole lot of narrative on typical southern life in USA in
those days of slavery and racial acrimony.
I was introduced to Grisham as a pass out college student. For me film
The Firm came ahead of reading the novel. I was just recruited off campus the story of yuppie stuck in fraud kind off stuck.
Later Grisham’s novels were bread and butter for reading experiences be it
daily home or travel. I was hungry at international airport reading Playing for
Pizza. That was foodie in Grisham which was great to read . Over recent years
the quality of writing has really gone
south.
