2034 by Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis

Published by Penguin Press on March 9, 2021

2034 is a geopolitical thriller set in — you guessed it — 2034. It blends diplomacy with military fiction to create the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse. Will the world end in nuclear strikes or will cooler heads prevail? I won’t tell, but I will say that I didn’t know how the story would end until it ended.

The primary boogeyman in 2034 is China. Russia and Iran and the United States contribute to the unnecessary escalation of hostilities while India plays a surprisingly central role after the war heats up. The tension begins as China continues to assert its false claim of sovereignty over all of the South China Sea. The US Navy is patrolling the area to minimize Chinese aggression when the Chinese reveal their cyber supremacy by disabling communications and most electronic systems on the Navy’s ships and airplanes. They also sink a couple of American warships and hack the communications systems of the US government. Meanwhile, Iran uses the same technology to take remote control of an American F-35 that has not-so-accidentally strayed into Iranian territory to test its new stealth capacity. Frankly, any country that breaks the rules to see if they can get away with it should have its toys taken away, but the American government obviously doesn’t see it that way.

A character with a John Bolton attitude toward American supremacy tells the American president to retaliate. Sandeep Chowdhury, a deputy national security advisor, is a voice of moderation in the administration but he doesn’t have the president’s ear. Lin Bao is a voice of moderation in the Chinese government, but he becomes a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong. Chowdhury’s uncle in India, Vice Admiral Patel, makes an informal attempt to act as peacemaker — as in, “you guys make peace or else” — leaving the reader to wonder whether good sense will prevail over an increasing escalation of strikes that will eventually assure the absence of winners.

Other notable characters include Major General Qassem Farshad, who doesn’t appreciate Iran’s role in this mess and is rewarded for expressing that opinion by being tasked with defending the Hormuz Strait islands against a Russian invasion. The pilot who lost his fighter to Iran, a man named Wedge who is the fourth generation in a family of Marine pilots, relishes the opportunity to lead a squadron of Hornets in an attack against China. The Hornet is the only available aircraft that can still be flown after all their electronic communications systems and computers are ripped out to prevent them from being hacked and hijacked. Sarah Hunt, the commodore of the squadron that mostly sinks in the initial conflict with the Chinese, does not relish her return to command after she learns that the war is about to become very ugly.

Road to Military Apocalypse novels have been around for decades. The plot’s familiarity does not detract from the story’s ability to engage the reader. The authors build tension by personalizing the story, showcasing characters who know what they stand to lose if hawks and despots prevail. It is, after all, the impact of events on people, rather than events themselves, that give a novel its heart. If Wedge comes across as a clichéd character, he is at least a likable cliché. Hunt could use an infusion of personality. Choudhury, Lin Bao, and Farshad are better characters simply because they each display more than one dimension.

While the action scenes are exciting — Wedge’s attempt to elude superior fighters in his stripped-down Hornet is a particularly entertaining segment — the authors made a smart choice by giving more attention to political conflicts than military battles. Spreading those conflicts across China, Iran, and the US (rather than focusing solely on American players) contributes to the story’s interest. The authors give the story a twist by making a convincing argument for India as a key global player. The anti-Chinese sentiment of Americans who don’t know the difference between a Chinese-American and a Chinese politburo member adds another nice touch to a story that, in the end, reminds us that America is about opportunity and unity, not supremacy and division.

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The Scapegoat by Sara Davis

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on March 2, 2021

The Scapegoat is proudly promoted as a postmodern novel. “Postmodern” is a red flag that often warns “this novel won’t make much sense.” The narrator, who views himself as a “glorified secretary” employed by Stanford’s medical school, decides to investigate the death of his father, who taught there as a professor. A school official is aware that the narrator’s father has “moved on” from Stanford but seems unaware of his death. Perhaps the narrator is confused about his father’s death. That would not be surprising, as the narrator is in a constant state of confusion, which necessarily leaves the reader confused.

The narrator describes his dreams, then sees people he recognizes from the dreams, people who disappear when he looks again. He sometimes mistakes one person for another — unless the person has transformed from one to the other. A key character who is about to meet an unfortunate fate seems to be a guest lecturer and then a graduate student and then the narrator’s mother, all within minutes. Sometimes characters have conversations with the narrator despite his failure to speak a word (or to remember that he has spoken), answering questions he didn’t ask (or doesn’t recall asking).

The narrator is doing his best to ignore people but sometimes recognizes them, almost as if he does so against his will. The narrator’s father was apparently absent quite often during the narrator’s childhood, or at least that’s what the narrator recalls. The narrator evidently has unhappy feelings about the mother who raised him. Perhaps this accounts for the narrator’s isolation, his determined attempt to avoid all social contact despite the characters who keep intruding on his solitude.

The narrator “herds” himself “from one confusion to the next” in a story that attaches great importance to a hotel room, a briefcase, and a paperweight shaped like a whale. The guest lecturer keeps popping into his life, apparently holding but concealing the key to some of the novel’s mysteries. What are the circumstances of his father’s death, assuming his father is dead? Why did his father check into a hotel using a fake name? Or is Shriver actually his name?

The hotel seems to have been built on the site of a California mission where a genocidal event occurred — perhaps it is now a tourist attraction for that reason — but how does the narrator’s father connect to the hotel that he apparently played some role in opening? What was his father doing in the hotel? Did the briefcase that the narrator found in the guest lecturer’s hotel room belong to his father? Is a briefcase that he later retrieves from the hotel the same briefcase, given that it is no longer covered in or stained by blood? Don’t expect any of these questions to be answered. The few answers that suggest themselves are not necessarily reliable.

As I understand it, the idea of postmodern literature is the recognition that meaning is subjective, that a story can have many meanings, or whatever meaning you want to ascribe to it. That seems true of all art, but postmodern writers often manufacture ambiguous, contradictory, or impossible events and then challenge the reader to interpret them. But why should I? a reader might ask. Perhaps the question is a sign that the reader is too lazy to engage in interpretive thought, or perhaps the reader thinks that the author is being lazy by stringing together a bunch of nonsense and saying, “You figure it out.” Both viewpoints are valid — in fact, in the postmodern world, everything is valid.

I am not a big fan of postmodern fiction, so perhaps I am one of those lazy readers who thinks the author should take responsibility for telling an intelligible story, perhaps leaving room for the reader to interpret ambiguities or symbols or to imagine what happens after the final chapter without sacrificing the coherence of traditional storytelling. There’s nothing wrong with making a reader think, but if I wanted to invent my own story, I’d be writing novels, not reading them. And if the story’s events are just a fiction within a fiction, are the events worthy of attention? If there’s no difference between a story and a dream, shouldn’t the story, like a dream, be quickly forgotten?

If I were to interpret The Scapegoat, I might guess that the narrator has a brain tumor, which would explain his apparent tendency to faint or black out or misremember or misperceive. But that interpretation might add a level of rationality to a novel that is intended to operate under rules that don’t exist in the rational world.

I have enjoyed some postmodern novels simply because they are whacky and playful, or because they accomplish the postmodernist goal of making me see the world in a different way. I was intrigued by The Scapegoat — the novel held my interest — but, promotional promises notwithstanding, I wasn't sufficiently "mesmerized" to spend significant time trying to make sense of it. The narrator tells us several times that nothing in his world makes sense. I agree, making it a world that I wouldn’t want to visit again, interesting though it might be.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker

First published in the UK in 2020; published by Henry Holt and Co. on March 2, 2021

Life is changing for Chief Walker. Walk can no longer conceal the tremors caused by Parkinson’s. Soon he’ll no longer be able to function in his job as chief of police. He loves Cape Haven but the town is in transition — tourists are buying up the choicest locations — and Walk’s persistent attempts to prevent new building permits from being issued are a lost cause. The only change that Walk sees as an improvement is the release of his childhood friend Vincent King from prison.

When they were both young, Vincent killed a girl in a hit-and-run without realizing that the accident had occurred. Walk found the body. Vincent served thirty years in prison, doing all he could to make the time difficult, apparently to punish himself. He was attacked by another inmate and killed the man. The authorities chalked it up to self-defense, but the death assured that Vincent wouldn’t benefit from an early release.

When Star Radley, the sister of the girl Vincent killed, is murdered in her home soon after Vincent’s release, Vincent calls the police to report the death. The police find him in the home with blood on his hands but they don’t find the gun with which Star was shot. Vincent won’t talk about what happened. Star’s daughter Duchess was out running an errand and her son Robin was in his bedroom. Robin won’t or can’t talk about anything he might have heard.

Vincent is arrested and his conviction seems assured. Convinced of Vincent’s innocence, Walk looks for an alternative killer. He’s joined in that quest by Martha May, who was bonded to Walk and Vincent in high school. Martha is a lawyer who helps abused women, not a criminal defense lawyer, but she’s the only lawyer Vincent will accept. Walk and Martha have two suspects. One is a creep named Richard Darke who apparently tried to take advantage of Star in the past. Vincent refused to sell his family land to Darke, preventing Darke from completing a development that will vastly increase his wealth.

We Begin at the End mixes a murder mystery with a courtroom drama, adds a couple of orphans to beef up the human interest, and injects a bit of romance to balance the gloom of undeserved deaths. The orphans are sympathetic characters with contrasting personalities —six-year-old Robin is a sweet and innocent boy who deals with multiple losses as the story unfolds, while his thirteen-year-old sister has bottled up her emotions and defined herself as an outlaw, the prototypical bad girl who isn’t all that bad. If introducing two plucky kids and a lawman with Parkinson’s seems manipulative, an obvious attempt to tug at a reader’s heartstrings, Chris Whitaker deserves praise for his ability to tell a story that evokes honest emotion without feeling contrived.

The small town where most of the story takes place, as well as small communities in Montana and Wyoming, contribute to the novel’s realism. The plot gives meaningful roles to neighbors who seem to be at war with each other, creating an abundance of suspects for the two killings that become the story’s focus. It also introduces supporting characters who are kind-hearted, if a bit broken, offsetting the more villainous characters. Yet even the villains are multi-dimensional, capable of empathy and refusing to cross certain lines even when they follow their selfish instincts.

The story is sufficiently complex to sustain interest without becoming confusing. Credible plot twists bring new surprises whenever it seems that the mysteries have been solved. The ending is sad but the story as a whole is sad because it reflects the truth that life isn’t always what we want it to be.

Good stories teach good lessons. Much of the story, as seen through the experiences of multiple characters, is about overcoming fear, including fear that we will not live up to our self-imposed standards. There are moments of redemption in We Begin at the End. Moments of hope. Moments in which fears are faced. Moments in which demons are confronted and faced down. They don’t offset the story’s sadness — the sadness gives the story its honesty — but they offer reason to believe that hardship and futility are not the purpose of life, that we can endure suffering if our endurance makes life better for people we care about, that we can learn to trust others and to trust ourselves.

RECOMMENDED

Foregone by Russell Banks

Publsihed by Ecco on March 2, 2021

Foregone might be read as a thought exercise, an exploration of the nature and meaning of change as it applies to a human life. Can people change in a fundamental way? They can try to change. They can pretend to be a different person, as actors do when they take the stage. They can alter their behavior and perhaps their personalities. But can they change their character? Leonard Fife struggles with that question as he approaches death, tries to make a new life with a better character, but perhaps he only succeeds in his imagination.

Fife was a celebrated documentarian in Canada, although his work is unknown outside of his country. He first gained fame with a documentary about American draft resisters who came to Canada. Malcolm MacLeod, one of Fife’s proteges, has agreed to make a documentary for the CBC (to be titled Oh, Canada) about Fife’s life and death. He doesn’t have much time to shoot the film because cancer is eating Fife’s body and perhaps his mind. Using Fife’s signature technique by interviewing Fife under a spotlight in a darkened room, Malcolm wants Fife to talk about his experience as a draft resister, how his escape to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War informed his work, and why he made certain choices while filming various documentaries. Fife has other ideas.

Fife begins the interview by explaining that his story of coming to Canada as a draft resister was an invention. He says he wants to tell the true story because his beloved wife, Emma Flynn, deserves to know the truth about the man she loves. Fife then embarks on a long, detailed story about two marriages in America that he has never discussed, one to a woman of unsound mind, the second to the daughter of a wealthy Virginia family. He had a chance to take over his father-in-law’s family business, but instead went to Vermont and had a brief dalliance with the wife of a friend. The details become progressively foggy as he tells the story, so it is never perfectly clear how or why he ended up in Canada. He was apparently running away, but from his life rather than the war.

As he speaks, Emma becomes increasingly concerned that the process of filming is harmful to Fife and that the finished product will harm his reputation. His Haitian nurse also objects to a process that she sees as cruel and unduly taxing — she thinks Fife should die in peace — but Fife insists that Malcolm press ahead with the interview.

As Fife tells his meandering story, refusing to answer Malcolm’s questions about his work so that he can discuss what he believes to be important, it becomes clear that Fife’s attempt to tell the truth is impaired by Fife’s inability to discern it. Fife is heavily sedated and in extreme pain. As he speaks, details change, times and places become jumbled and distorted. Perhaps he knew Bob Dylan and Joan Baez but did he meet them in Canada or Boston? After a bit, Fife even begins to question whether the words he is speaking reflect the clarity of the story he is trying to tell. He is sure that he has been speaking from early morning to mid-afternoon when Malcolm tells him that the interview has lasted only a couple of hours, and that Fife must have misunderstood remarks that he believes suggest otherwise. It seems unlikely that Fife could have related the entire story, replete with cultural analysis of topics that include Kerouac and cars, in just half a morning. Fife thus becomes the epitome of the unreliable narrator, although not by intention.

On the other hand, it isn’t clear that Fife ever intended to tell the historical truth. He may intend his story to express the deeper truth of how he feels about himself, how his character is flawed in ways that Emma has never understood.

At times, Foregone is a frustrating novel. It seems like a slow walk to an elusive destination that moves farther away with each step taken in its direction. Initially, the destination seems to be the truth that Fife promised, the actual and shocking reason he moved to Canada. But by the novel’s end, the destination has become less important than the journey, a trip that exists only in Fife’s failing and jumbled memory. Perhaps the journey’s true destination is Fife’s end-of-life fear that he hasn’t been the person he should have been, and that his love of Emma, which should have been primary at all times, is all that matters. Emma echoes that belief in her recognition that nothing Fife says in the interview is important. She knows what’s important: he loved her, and she loved him.

When the cameraman asks Malcolm whether he thinks Fife’s story was true, Malcolm shrugs off the question because the truth doesn’t matter. What matters is that he got his film. What matters to the Haitian nurse is something more personal. What matters, Foregone seems to say, is a question of perspective. Perhaps it is only at the end of life that we gain the perspective to understand what is truly important.

Fife’s story, unreliable and frustrating though it might be, is always interesting. Nothing ever seems settled, and if some of the story is true, it seems awfully unfinished, leaving more questions than answers. Those very qualities — faults, I would have called them, before reading to the end — capture the larger truth that so much of life remains unsettled at the end of life. I wouldn’t say that the truths Fife has embraced at the novel’s end are profound — yes, love is a good thing to have; yes, we should prioritize the things that matter — but the story illustrates the profound changes that accompany aging and death, whether expressed as regret or as a last desperate attempt to reshape character, to leave the world as a better person, as if wishing it were true might be enough to make it true.

RECOMMENDED

A Legacy of Spies by John le Carré

Published by Viking on September 5, 2017

John le Carré created the most extraordinary character in spy fiction when George Smiley appeared in Call for the Dead (1961). Smiley became a primary or secondary character in several other novels, including The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), the novel that put John le Carré on the map. In the Karla trilogy (1974 to 1979) — the best spy novels and among the finest literary novels I’ve ever read — Smiley unmasks a mole in British intelligence. Smiley was a moral man who used immoral means to do his job well and suffered for it. Younger than Smiley but often at his side was Peter Guillam, a key player who helped Smiley gather information that exposed the double agent and brought down Karla, the mole’s handler.

John le Carré died at the end of 2020, leaving behind a legacy of brilliant spy fiction (plus a mainstream novel that I quite enjoyed). His final novel, published in 2019, was a standalone. Two years before the release of that novel, he penned the aptly titled A Legacy of Spies, the last novel in the Smiley series. In many ways, it showcases his own legacy by reaching back to the events in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and explaining how events leading up to and following the tragedy of that novel — Alec Leamas and Liz Gold are shot at the Berlin Wall — were manipulated by Smiley and the man known only as Control.

At Smiley’s direction, Guillam has kept the true details of that incident out of the official record. Eventually the truth bites at his ankles, as Alec’s son, Cristoph, together with Liz’s daughter Karen, have sued the government, claiming that it is complicit in their parents’ deaths. Well, they’re right about that to some degree, although they don’t know all the details of Operation Windfall, conceived to smoke out the traitor in the upper ranks of the Secret Intelligence Service and to mislead Russia while protecting a vital source, an operation that had unfortunate consequences for Leamas and Gold.

Now the SIS needs to feed someone to the wolves to satisfy Parliament. Smiley is nowhere to be found. Official files have disappeared and, if they could be found, they would be covered with Guillam’s fingerprints. Guillam is politely interrogated before being locked in a library where he can read some of the secret files he hid (although not the ones he concealed off premises) as a prelude to answering more questions. Much of the novel is told in Guillam’s memory as he reads memoranda, some of which he wrote, and tries to assemble a coherent story about the past that doesn’t quite live up to the truth. As he does so, he fears that only Smiley can save him from his own indiscretions.

It put a smile on my face just to read the names of characters who have become iconic in spy fiction: Toby Esterhase, Bill Hayden, and the memorable Jim Prideaux, who makes a brief appearance near the novel’s end, quite unchanged since his featured role in The Honourable Schoolboy. And of course Smiley himself, still idealistic, still troubled by the moral choices that challenge his idealism. Looking back on his life, Smiley admits that he has never cared about preserving capitalism or Christendom. His duty was to England, not the England of Brexit but an England that was “leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason.” That England, he frets, may be moving away from reason and returning to darkness, as was much of the world when A Legacy of Spies was published.

Guillam is old as he tells this story. Unless John le Carré left a nearly finished manuscript lying about, it is his last appearance, a last glimpse of all the characters who did their best during the Cold War to lead England out of darkness. It offers the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is Smiley’s career and puts a frame around the completed picture. John le Carré did his fans a huge favor, and added to an unparalleled legacy of his own, with A Legacy of Spies.

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