My Account | RSS
| ||
|
||
The Ghost War
by Alex Berenson
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
Espionage thrillers need bad guys. Terrorists, while evil, don't quite fill the bill, since any dreams of world domination they might espouse aren't entirely credible. The BBC series Spooks, perhaps understandably, portrays the American CIA as the bad guys as often as not, and the French security services as, at the very least, uncooperative, which is all very well dramatically, but inter-agency competition between allies isn't as invigorating as a good, old-fashioned stand-off between the white hats and the black hats with the future of the free world at stake.
So it's a good thing that the Russians have returned to parading tanks and missiles through Red Square on May Day: it means that they can once again be the bad guys in American spy thrillers. The Chinese -- purveyors of sports shoes to the world -- make something of a poor substitute. But you can't blame The Ghost War for trying.
Actually, The Ghost War is quite enjoyable and reasonably plausible once one engages the suspension of disbelief necessary for immersion in this kind of book. A rogue Chinese general has been running his own foreign policy involving Iran, North Korea, a Switzerland-based arms-dealer and the Taliban, designed to destabilize relations across the Pacific so he can take power in Beijing. He's not all bad: he opposes what he sees as China's epidemic corruption. The rest of the Chinese leadership is portrayed as self-centred suits more interested in banqueting that running the country. CIA agent John Wells follows a trail from the mountains of Afghanistan to the Forbidden City to uncover the conspiracy while being shot at and beaten up in the process.
Berenson, a reporter for the New York Times fills The Ghost War with plausible fictional versions of actual events or almost-events, but he sometimes get tripped up by the speed at which actual events unfold: it is hard to suppress a grin at a line like "Any threat between Iran and United States would take the price of crude to $100 a barrel" - he means "up to $100 of course, not "down". One supposes that the novel takes place some time after 2008, for Berenson has the American President saying "let's try not to go to war if we can help it. We've learned a few things since 2003" -- so it can't be the current administration, which doesn't seem to have learned anything at all.
Unfortunately for thriller writers, the Chinese don't need to shoot torpedoes at American ships to cause real consternation in Washington: all they need to do is dump their T-bills.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
by Alex Berenson
Reviewed by Peter Gordon
Espionage thrillers need bad guys. Terrorists, while evil, don't quite fill the bill, since any dreams of world domination they might espouse aren't entirely credible. The BBC series Spooks, perhaps understandably, portrays the American CIA as the bad guys as often as not, and the French security services as, at the very least, uncooperative, which is all very well dramatically, but inter-agency competition between allies isn't as invigorating as a good, old-fashioned stand-off between the white hats and the black hats with the future of the free world at stake.
So it's a good thing that the Russians have returned to parading tanks and missiles through Red Square on May Day: it means that they can once again be the bad guys in American spy thrillers. The Chinese -- purveyors of sports shoes to the world -- make something of a poor substitute. But you can't blame The Ghost War for trying.
Actually, The Ghost War is quite enjoyable and reasonably plausible once one engages the suspension of disbelief necessary for immersion in this kind of book. A rogue Chinese general has been running his own foreign policy involving Iran, North Korea, a Switzerland-based arms-dealer and the Taliban, designed to destabilize relations across the Pacific so he can take power in Beijing. He's not all bad: he opposes what he sees as China's epidemic corruption. The rest of the Chinese leadership is portrayed as self-centred suits more interested in banqueting that running the country. CIA agent John Wells follows a trail from the mountains of Afghanistan to the Forbidden City to uncover the conspiracy while being shot at and beaten up in the process.
Berenson, a reporter for the New York Times fills The Ghost War with plausible fictional versions of actual events or almost-events, but he sometimes get tripped up by the speed at which actual events unfold: it is hard to suppress a grin at a line like "Any threat between Iran and United States would take the price of crude to $100 a barrel" - he means "up to $100 of course, not "down". One supposes that the novel takes place some time after 2008, for Berenson has the American President saying "let's try not to go to war if we can help it. We've learned a few things since 2003" -- so it can't be the current administration, which doesn't seem to have learned anything at all.
Unfortunately for thriller writers, the Chinese don't need to shoot torpedoes at American ships to cause real consternation in Washington: all they need to do is dump their T-bills.
--
Peter Gordon is editor of The Asian Review of Books.
Available in Asia from Paddyfield.com
|
