This is a book about the most awesome hired killer you've ever heard of, Nicholai Hel. The guy who speaks six languages, who mastered a form of martial arts that lets him kill with ordinary household objects, who spent three years in solitary confinement and not only added Basque as another language he knew, but unlocked a long-vestigal parasensory ability that is somewhere between Daredevil's radar sense and when DragonBall Z characters sense someone's energy. Who spends his retirement as one of the best cavers in the world, and has also mastered Stage IV lovemaking.
There is a plot, sort of, involving the last survivor of a group intent on killing the last survivors of the terrorists who attacked the Munich Olympics. There's a shadowy consortium of energy conglomerates who control governments and their security agencies involved. There's revenge and painful deaths, and all that jazz.
There are also a frankly distracting amount of disparaging generalizations tossed off about basically every race or ethnicity on the planet, except the Japanese. Nicholai Hel is not Japanese, mind you. He's German and Russian, raised in Shanghai and mentored by first a Japanese general, descended from 1000 years of samurai, then by a master of the game Go, but Japanese culture, art, whatever is pretty consistently held as superior to everything else. There's also a frankly disturbing amount of eugenics coded crap about how such-and-such character is a perfect blend of some races' characteristics, or that Hel's intelligence is based on genetic superiority.
There's a brief note on Wikipedia describing the book as a "meta-spy thriller", which I assume means Trevanian is going to these absurd lengths as commentary. That note is the only reason I'd consider that possibility, and I only read it because I was looking around for some idea of whether this author was a weirdo nutbag conspiracist or something. Until then, I was reading the book with the assumption Trevanian simply had no filter or sense of proportion. The book has similar beats and tics as Clive Cussler's Dirk Pitt books - certainly in how all women characters are reduced to sexual objects - that I read in junior high and high school, but everything was dialed up to 11, to the point of distraction.
Now, does it matter whether this was a commentary, rather than simply being entirely earnest? It's not just the bad guys who say things like an Arab life is worth about $2.50, or that Americans are a mongrel race with no culture of their own because they're the dregs of Europe. It's the ostensible protagonist and the omniscient narrator saying dumb crap like, 'he bowed with the quiet petulance Germans mistake for dignity,' or that Chinese art is too hyperbolically emotional, whatever the fuck that's supposed to mean.
When Trevanian sticks to just having characters do things, the book can be engaging. The section where Nicholai and his Basque sidekick - who punctuates nearly every sentence with some variation of "By the Two Balls of {insert Catholic religious figure}!" - explore a cave is the high point. The tension of navigating the dangers is handled well, Nicholai actually shows kindness and respect to his friend. Though I'm surprised he went into as much detail as he did. Earlier in the book he added a footnote that he would not describe Nicholai's methods of killing because someone might imitate them. A stuntman died trying to do the mountain climbing described in The Eiger Sanction when they filmed the movie (which he apparently hated), so he couldn't take the risk. But what if someone imitates his caving descriptions? There'll be blood on his hands!
Of course, those brief moments are inevitably interrupted by another diatribe about someone's culture, or how shallow and ignorant everyone else but Nicholai is, or the meaninglessness of critics or democracy, or people in secret rooms talking about how goshdarn impressive Nicholai is. It's always jarring, leaving me wondering what Trevanian's problem is. It's ultimately a book that could either function as satire, or just be crap where the author tries to save face by claiming it's meant to be satire.
I'm glad I only spent 50 cents on it.
'During the third season of her reign, Alexandra Ivanova appeared to settle her attentions upon a vain young Prussian who possessed that pellucid, superficial intelligence untrammeled by sensitivity that is common to his race.'
No comments:
Post a Comment