Raven and the Raven Deception

So here's the deal: I'm leaving town again tomorrow (more family-related stuff). I ought to be back in town by the 31st at the latest, and I'm hoping there will be some internet access where I'm going, so I might even be able to do a little blogging. It'll likely be book-related, but that's better than nothing, right? And hey, I'll see my buddy Alex while I'm gone, which means there'll certainly be a massive movie post or two when I get back. Good times, huh?

So, for the last post I'm certain to do before I leave, I wanted to talk about a pair of books I read during my time out of town this week. As I mentioned yesterday, there wasn't any internet (or cable for that matter), so I turned to my old friends, the books, to pass the time. Six of them to be exact, over five days, and I can now say I am quite finished with World War 2 related fiction for awhile. Today, I'm only going to talk about The Raven and The Raven Deception by Michael Murray.

The Raven introduces us to August Street, who works for a research foundation, and has been sent to England to review some WW2 documents that are under consideration to be declassified, as part of a joint U.S./U.K. thing, with Street representing the U.S. In the course of reviewing these files, Street comes across Operation Raven. There's almost nothing to it, but the U.K. rep, a friend of Street's recommended against declassifying. Even though it basically doesn't matter what he says at that point, Street chooses to go digging, uncovers a startling secret, etc. The Raven Deception deals with the fallout of what Street chose to do with what he learned.

First things first. These books needed a better editor. It's a bunch of little things, but there was inconsistent punctuation, lack of spacing between words, double indented paragraphs for no apparent reason, lack of new paragraphs where there ought to be, so on and so on. Not hugely detrimental to my reading the books, but it did start to wear on me after awhile (of course, I was stressed for other reasons too, so the book may be unfairly taking the brunt of that). The more irritating things were the occasional shift in scene location from one paragraph to the next, with no indication that had happened. You'd be reading a conversation in Britain, then you're reading interactions by characters in Russia all of the sudden. Usually there's a break between those, to indicate that you're moving to somewhere else for awhile, but that wasn't always the case, and I found it jarring and mildly annoying. Plus, The Raven Deception reprinted, verbatim, a 23 page sequence from The Raven. While it had the advantage of letting me skim that section, it felt like a cheat, to pad the book. A summary, and more time spent elsewhere might have been better.

Even though it had more of the grammatical errors, I enjoyed The Raven more. I have no idea how historically plausible its premise is, it certainly seems like a stretch (basically, SPOILER!, the British parachute commandos into Germany, wreck Hitler's train, kill Hitler, and use a British actor to impersonate him long enough to cancel Operation Sealion. Except a German patrol arrives as they withdraw, and the only way for the commandos to escape is for the the actor to pretend to be an injured Fuhrer - as the real one was burned beyond recognition - so the patrol will focus on getting him medical attention.) It's basically an attempt to explain Hitler's odd tactical decisions in the later stages of the war, as well as the defection of Rudolph Hess. The premise taxed my suspension of disbelief just about as far as it can go, but Murray made a game enough attempt to explain how it could work that I went along with it, and the parts that deal with the inner turmoil of one Archie Smythes, as well as the toll that the mission takes on him over time made it mostly pay off. I'm not sure I could feel his terror, though if it had been more noticeable the book might not have lasted as long.

The Raven Deception felt more paint-by-numbers, as we get the usual story about the shadowy government agencies flexing their muscles by wrecking the life of the guy who won't just play ball, then they decide to kill him, but he somehow survives until new characters appear from (almost) nowhere to save him, and are able to do so somehow or the other. The sequences involving Steven Dietrich (an American born German who flies in the Luftwaffe during WW2) were generally entertaining, but you get more that that in The Raven anyway. One thing I would have liked to see more of in The Raven Deception was the difficulties between the United Kingdom and Russia, which arose as a result of Arthur Street's decision of what to do with the information he had gathered. It pops up twice in the book, then becomes a major part of the conclusion, rather abruptly I felt. It's basically explained as it happens, and I was not entirely pleased with that. There was also a part of the story with a character from The Raven being captured by the police in Spain, and then tortured, and I was never all that sure what was going on there.

My advice is if you're going to read one, read The Raven, assuming that the premise as I described it didn't exceed your oddball tolerances.