Article - The Politics Of Popular Thrillers

A well-made popular is not to be sneered at. The problem is that there aren’t all that many.

A cursory trawl through the display racks of many an airport and railway station book stall reveals the usual suspects; the Dan Browns, John Grishams, JamesPattersons, Jeffrey Archers, et al.

The best you can say about many of these prose potboilers is the writing style is pedestrian, the plotting perfunctory, the characters cardboard, the dialogue dully banal. Some, particularly the works of Dan Brown and Eric Van Lustbader, also suffer from laboured Germanic sentence formation that appears to indicate that English is the second language of these authors. You might have ploughed through the kind I’m talking about; with single sentences the size of an average paragraph, packed with subordinate clauses like an overloaded freight train so that the narrative chugs along sluggishly.

If simple entertainment is the aim, most fail dismally.

Take that doyen of the spy story, Ian Fleming himself. We get elaborate descriptions, running over lengthy paragraphs, of the clothing and toiletries used by James Bond, plus the meals he eats and his reactions to the food served. By contrast, the sex and violence that are supposed to excite vicarious excitement in the reader are perfunctorily dispensed with in just a few sentences. One sometimes gets the feeling Fleming missed his true calling; he should have been an advertising copywriter or a staff writer on the lifestyle section of a Sunday supplement.

To his credit, Fleming himself recognized his limitations, being very depressed by the justified drubbing he received at the hands of the critics of the day. Unlike most writers of trashy bestsellers, he didn’t try to assume a spurious literary respectability and once memorably called his famous creation a “cardboard booby”. He also declared that the act of writing was like getting a horribly onerous task out of the way, like “digging a hole in the garden”. This shows in his prose, which when not informed by a schoolboy tongue-in-cheek archness, is often quite leaden. Fleming also frequently resorted to the clumsy device of telegraphic dialogue to signify that his hero was tough, decisive and competent.

The politics of James Bond were also somewhat suspect; this wasn’t just the view of left-liberal literary critics, but cold war think tanks that had made it their business to study the USSR and the communist bloc in general. For example, the SMERSH made so infamous as “the principal Soviet organ of vengeance” was in reality a limited counter-espionage initiative that never operated beyond the borders of the Soviet Union and was disbanded shortly after World War 2. As it became obvious that the onus of villainy couldn’t be exclusively laid at the door of the USSR, and because he feared that the Cold War wouldn’t last long enough, Fleming then invented the wildly improbable criminal syndicate called SPECTRE as an alternative antagonist for his hero.

The familiar thriller trope of the former USSR plotting world domination was shot down by the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), no less. This was never part of Soviet strategic doctrine which emphasized the encouragement of friendly left-aligned governments worldwide, rather than outright invasion and occupation of foreign countries perceived to be in opposition to the USSR. Khruschev’s disastrous adventurism and the Cuban missile crisis during the 1960s permanently turned the Kremlin away from such ventures – and towards detente.

If anything, the Afghan misadventure and more recent problems with Syria, Ukraine and Chechnya, have made the Russians even more wary of being further mired in overseas imbroglios. Under Putin, they are currently trying to extricate themselves from charges of puppet mastering the deplorable Donald and his shambolic presidential regime. If effectively manipulating the recent US election counts as a success, this could well turn out to be a pyrrhic victory that could cost Russia dearly.

The political premises around which most contemporary thrillers are built wouldn’t stand scrutiny by any reasonably informed student of political science or international relations. Take, for example, that 1971 classic The Day Of The Jackal by Frederick Forsyth. Most ballistic experts agree that a mercury droplet in the hollowed-out nose of a bullet would never work. And assassinating De Gaulle would probably have just meant faster promotion for his eventual successor Georges Pompidou...

Despite the implication that former Nazis had effectively manipulated the politics of the postwar Deustche Bundesrepublik in Forsyth’s The Odessa File, German polity then was mostly dominated by centre-left Social Democrats. The far right German Republikaner party (considered by some to be political descendants of the Nazis) was pushed to the fringes, having only a marginal electoral presence at best. If the Nazis had successfully taken over the German Federal Government, shouldn’t they have also manipulated the electorate to vote a suitably far right party to power?

Available reports from the period indicate that most former Nazis were doing their best to avoid prosecution, while trying desperately to maintain a low profile and hoping that the passage of time would help bury their war crimes. Widespread revelations about the atrocities and excesses of the Third Reich had also effectively turned the German public away from any kind of general neo-Nazi resurgence.

As a member of both NATO and the European Union, Germany is embedded in a network of alliances that would constrain the possible rise of a future Fourth Reich. This effectively invalidates the central premise of the late Robert Ludlum’s purple potboiler The Holcroft Covenant. In addition, Germany’s neighbours to the East (Russia) and the West (the British and the French) were (and still are) armed with thermonuclear and biochemical weapons that would quickly put an end to another would-be Hitler – and the entire reunified German nation too, if it was foolish enough to follow such a personage in an unwise program of militaristic aggrandizement.

There is an old saw that violence doesn’t solve anything; but state-organized violence certainly solved the problem of Nazi Germany. It could do the same for a future neo-Nazi Germany too. This would constitute a “final solution” of sorts that no sane German government could possibly countenance.

Another tired thriller trope that doesn’t stand up too well in today’s times is the familiar one of not-so-Great Britain’s defence and security services repeatedly saving the world. Even during the high watermark of the Cold War during the 1970s, 1980s and the 90s, this theme did appear somewhat improbable; that a post-imperial island nation in gradual political and economic decline was capable of such impressive feats. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was ranked just 25^th among the world’s leading powers then, based on various indices. 

This growing incapacity has been further accelerated by the recent “Brexit” that has seen Britain isolated from a potentially lucrative economic bloc. This is NOT calculated to arrest, or even, reverse, the ongoing decline in the British manufacturing and service sectors. And as political and military clout on the world stage ultimately depend on a national economic base, the UK’s declining ability to influence events overseas can only drastically depreciate further.

It could be argued that most writers of popular thrillers are out to entertain, not provide documentary treatises on geo-political strategy and international relations. However, as a lot of these poorly composed and written potboilers fail to thrill, excite or even interest, the only remaining crutch they have is of verisimilitude or some semblance of fealty towards the political realities of today.

The problem is they fail miserably at this too.