Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Wednesday September 22, 2010
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THREE BOOKS ABOUT SCIENCE FICTION
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Reviewed by Sara Sklaroff
Even if you prefer your reading to be of the escapist variety, you probably aren't dreaming about escaping to a world on the verge of (or recovering from) an apocalypse. And yet the most interesting things seem to happen in these sorts of places -- at least in science fiction.
1. The London of China Mieville's new novel, "Kraken" (Del Rey, $26), is no town for tourists. Or bystanders. When a giant squid specimen mysteriously disappears, Billy Harrow, a curator at the Natural History Museum's Darwin Centre, is forced to jump into the thick of a potentially world-shattering battle. At about 28 feet long and preserved in gallons of formaldehyde, the architeuthis dux could hardly have been carried out the museum's front door. Billy spends most of the book trying to figure out what really happened: Who stole the massive mollusk, how did they do it, and for what purpose? Teamed up with an excommunicated member of the Congregation of God Kraken (one of many alternative sects predicting that the end is nigh), he meets magical underworlders who ply their knacks in a London he'd no idea existed. While Mieville is a bit prone to cephalopodan silliness (does he really have to call it a "squidnapping"?), it's great fun to watch the pleasure he takes in wordsmithing. At more than 500 pages, "Kraken" is not a particularly disciplined work, but it's still an entertaining twist on this venerable tentacled sci-fi trope (think Jules Verne, Lovecraft, even "Pirates of the Caribbean").
2. In the post-apocalyptic Africa of Nnedi Okorafor's "Who Fears Death" (DAW, $24.95), magic is nearly a normal occurrence -- minor juju and major mojo alike. Weaponized rape and the mutilation of girls are almost as commonplace. Onyesonwu (the translation of her name forms the title of the book) is herself the product of rape, made evident by her distinctive complexion and hair, a mix of the region's dominant race (the Nuru) and the enslaved one (the Okeke) that automatically classes her an outcast. As she matures, Onyesonwu learns that she is able to shape-shift into animal forms and even draw back the spirits of the recently dead. She begins formal training in sorcery but cuts it short in favor of a mission that will ultimately rewrite the future of the Okeke people. In treating subjects such as the abuse of women, gender politics and racial genocide, Okorafor comes dangerously close to polemic. But she never crosses that line, opting instead for a story that is both wondrously magical and terribly realistic.
3. Istanbul is a city encrusted with history, where cultures have mingled and tangled for centuries. In "The Dervish House" (Pyr, $26), Ian McDonald adds a few more ingredients to this urban stew: jinn, animal robots and nanotech-wielding religious terrorists. It's 2027, and Turkey has finally made its way into the European Union. Rogue commodities traders are planning a daring financial coup. Young inventor-entrepreneurs pursue seed money for a game-changing bit of technology. An antiquarian pursues what may be her greatest find ever: a corpse mummified in honey and said to have magical powers. Meanwhile, a local man begins having bizarre religious visions that seem to have come from nowhere. McDonald traces these interlocking story lines through the course of a week that is bookended by a tram bombing and a crucial soccer match. Written with care and intelligence, "The Dervish House" whirls along at a heady pace but still manages to give a deep sense of another place that would be great to visit -- so long as you didn't have to live there.
Sara Sklaroff is the editorial director of Diabetes Forecast.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE COBRA
Frederick Forsyth
Putnam
ISBN 978 0 399 15680 9
364 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Patrick Anderson, who regularly reviews thrillers and mysteries for The Washington Post
At the start of Frederick Forsyth's 13th novel, the president of the United States (not named but said to have had a Kenyan father, which narrows the field) is moved by a teenager's fatal overdose to declare an all-out war on the Colombian cocaine industry. To direct this war, he recruits a retired CIA official named Paul Devereaux, known as The Cobra for his ruthlessness. The crusty Devereaux demands and gets a $2 billion budget, total secrecy and control over a special military force. He decides that the cocaine trade cannot be defeated on the ground, either in Colombia or the United States and Europe, and must instead be pursued on the high seas, by attacks on the cartel's ships and airplanes, which deliver hundreds of tons of the drug. The president secretly agrees to reclassify cocaine smuggling as terrorism. The smugglers will be pursued like al-Qaeda: shoot to kill and no questions asked.
Forsyth was a journalist before he turned to fiction, and one of his strengths, going back to his 1971 classic, "The Day of the Jackal," has been his exhaustive research. In "The Cobra," we soon learn more than we ever expected to know about the growth, production, transportation and sale of cocaine. For the first half of the novel, a fascinating account of a corporate-style cartel's multibillion-dollar business alternates with a portrait of Devereaux grimly building a military force to destroy it.
Forsyth does not devote the same care to his characters, who are easily identified as the good guys and the bad guys. Devereaux is a hero and patriot, as is his deputy, lawyer Cal Dexter, who became a nemesis of criminals after his daughter was raped and murdered in a previous Forsyth novel. The U.S. and British military men who assist them are equally heroic. The drug lords, by contrast, are vicious, cowardly, paranoid and given to settling disputes with torture and chainsaws.
Once the war begins, it's almost laughably one-sided. Devereaux's secret army/navy/air force can halt a ship at sea, disrupt its communications via high-tech electronics, seize its tons of cocaine, take its crew prisoner and sink the ship without the cartel knowing what hit them. Forsyth scorns political correctness, but he resorts to a version of it in these attacks. The cartel's cocaine-carrying airplanes can't be stopped at sea like ships; they have to be blown out of the skies. But his high-minded U.S. and British pilots aren't into coldblooded murder. Happily, an officer of the Royal Air Force tells Dexter: "Mind you, there is one Air Force that will blow a cocaine smuggler out of the sky without compunction. The Brazilians." Just why Brazilian pilots are given to homicide is unclear, but we soon meet Maj. Joao Mendoza, who -- driven in part by having lost his younger brother to cocaine -- gladly incinerates 17 drug-laden planes and their crews.
At times, "The Cobra" becomes the 72-year-old Forsyth's hymn to old soldiers, old wars and old certitudes. Devereaux is around 70, and Dexter is about 60. Many of their colleagues are retired soldiers who often reflect on days gone by. In Rotterdam, Forsyth conjures up "a British Tommy who had marched through (the city) in a welter of flowers and kisses in early 1945." Another scene recalls an all-night battle "among the rocks of Tora Bora" between a small force of U.S. Navy SEALs and al-Qaeda fighters, after which "in the morning light they counted three hundred Al Qaeda corpses." One main character in the book, better developed than any human, is the Blackburn Buccaneer, a British naval bomber introduced in the 1960s and lovingly revived here to help win the war on cocaine. Forsyth's scorn for young whippersnappers focuses on the White House chief of staff, an ex-congressman from Illinois who is said to be hot-tempered and foul-mouthed but is soon put in his place by Devereaux's slights and insults.
There's some good writing in "The Cobra," and fans of military adventures may delight in it. Forsyth remains a master of logistics, but the novel's plot is often unconvincing, and the war on cocaine finally becomes a fantasy that spins out of control. After I finished the novel, I picked up "The Dogs of War" (1974), Forsyth's third novel, which I'd never read. It concerns some mercenaries who set out to conquer a small African nation. It's brilliant, fascinating, reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway's work. "The Cobra," by contrast, too often reminded me of Tom Clancy. If you want Forsyth at his best -- which is very, very good -- go back to those early novels.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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