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Magazine
Terror as a plot
DAVID DAVIDAR
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Here is a book about a group of vicious terrorists stacked up against an equally ruthless counter force.
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IT's not often that Christmas is the saddest time of the year, but this year it certainly feels like it. September 11, the war in Afghanistan, the attack on Parliament, we sure need a break. In one of those horrible coincidences that happen to all of us, I picked up a thriller, David Baldacci's Last Man Standing (Warner) that's been roosting on the New York Times bestseller list for some weeks now, and discovered that it was all about a bunch of vicious terrorists. They're not jihadis, but run the worst of the world's terrorists close when it comes to killing innocents.
Stacked up against them are the toughest, best-armed, most ruthless counter terrorist force in the world, the Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), an elite unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The HRT is so tough that some of the deadliest soldiers and police in the world — veterans of Delta Force, the Navy seals and other crack squads — who apply to get in are turned down.
As the novel opens, one of the best HRT teams around is mowed down by a gang of suspected drug-runners. The only man left alive is a legendary HRT operative called Web London. For reasons that we spend the rest of the novel discovering, London freezes up when his squad moves into action and is therefore not eliminated with the rest. As his actions come under scrutiny by the FBI, London decides to find those responsible for the massacre, while simultaneously attempting to analyse himself in order to find out why he wasn't able to handle the attack as he would have normally done.
The action rips along at speed, and most thriller freaks will have enough to keep them entertained — pages and pages of description of the latest models of arms and ammunition, terror tactics, counter-terrorist operations and the like.
This is certainly a book for boys, not much room for subtlety and characterisation, but a cracking good example of the genre.
* * *
At a recent function in Chennai, Indran Amirthanayagam, who works for the United States Foreign Service, gave me a copy of his latest book of poems, "Ceylon, R.I.P". Indran has published several collections of poems in both English and Spanish and on the evidence of this book is a pretty good poet. The poems I liked the best are set in his native Sri Lanka. Here's an excerpt from one of them:
After the Monsoon
The monsoon broke,
went back to the sea,
and let the children out
to bathe in the day's blood
lizards wet and dreamy plopping
in puddles, crows mango-beaked
assembling on walls
Ceylon days, what's left,
I'm trying to gather essences.
* * *
And, finally to end, a book I flip through from time to time, is a sort of commonplace book by John Julius Norwich called Christmas Crackers. It's been long out of print so don't go looking for it.
Anyway the reason I go back to it from time to time, is because some of the pieces anthologised in it are very fine indeed. And so here's hoping this short excerpt will bring a bit of Christmas balm to our rather weary souls.
It describes a common bird taken from an old book about bird-watching, The Peregrine by J.A. Baker: "The first bird I searched for was the nightjar, which used to nest in the valley. Its song is like the sound of a stream of wine spilling from a height into a deep and booming cask.It is an odorous sound, with a bouquet that rises to the quiet sky. In the glare of day it would seem thinner and drier, but dusk mellows it and gives it vintage. If a song could smell, this song would smell of crushed grapes and almonds and dark wood.
The sound spills out, and none of it is lost. The whole wood brims with it. Then it stops. Suddenly, unexpectedly. But the ear hears it still, a prolonged and fading echo, draining and winding out among the surrounding trees".
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