The Missing Thriller

Dear Readers,

Black and white explanation for everything, the simplification of perplexed political maneuverings, the apparent unabashed deceits presented as the hype of conspiracy theory, these are quite good for the swindlers. The good and the bad, the beauty and the beast, so simple in clarity, so refined in texture for our moral nutrition and peaceful sleep after a heady day.

Writers are part of this world community. To find out why there is not much uproar in the literary communities, in the world of fiction, except a notable few, is a task for the sociologists and the future historians shall play their role too.

But for the contemporary regular folks it seems to be convoluted to know why the human nature is such that it continually concocts and fabricate myths in the defense of bigotry and misleads.

The same writer once revered for exposing the cold war intelligence, for example John le Carre, are vindicated and amply criticized for writing “Absolute Friends”, a story where the protagonist is quite opposed to last year’s misleading war against Iraq. Before publishing this novel, John le Carre wrote articles with scathing criticism on Iraq war last year too.

Here is a snippet from the New York Times’ article:

“We desperately want clarity and understanding, not more suggestions that ''intelligence'' is an oxymoron, and we seem to need to believe that our enemies are fundamentally different from ourselves. Perhaps we're not ready yet for fiction, or for the darker truths it tends to tell.”

“…our enemies are fundamentally different from ourselves” – such a handy tool, such a comfort generator. We can as well close our eyes and ears, pinch our nose, while the stench from slaughters wafting, and bleating and screaming of dying souls expire in the background, comfortably placed out of sight and out of mind.

Let’s watch Janet Jackson and Britney Spears instead, and skim through tabloid full of gleeful romance!

“History” for the victors and by the victors, thus the world, thus the “reality”.

Regards,
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
February 16, 2004




The Missing Thriller
By CHARLES McGRATH



Here's a great idea for a thriller. You start with some anxious post-9/11 atmosphere: terrorists; suicide bombings; psychotic dictators with stockpiles of weapons; high-level meetings in Washington and London; black-windowed limousines whooshing through the streets late at night. The United States government dispatches an agent, a former ambassador, to an African country that is rumored to be selling uranium to a crazy dictator. The diplomat reports that the rumors are unfounded, much to the annoyance of his superiors, and shortly afterward his wife, a spy for the C.I.A., is outed. Meanwhile, over in England, a scientist has quietly been questioning his government's assessment of the mad dictator's threat. A few days later he turns up dead in a remote country lane, his wrist cut, a packet of pills by his side. Everywhere the hero of your novel looks -- oops, make that heroine -- there are signs of a worldwide plot designed to confuse the free world and render it helplessly paranoid. Even the president of the United States may have been brainwashed.

This stuff is hard to make up, and you don't have to anymore. It's right there in the news. What's odd is that most of our thriller writers -- the people who in the past have taught us most of what we know about intelligence gathering and intelligence failure -- don't seem to be interested in the post-9/11 landscape. With the exception of Jon Land (whose most recent book, ''The Blue Widows,'' is about a Palestinian-American detective trying to thwart an Islamic terrorist threat), they're writing instead about corporate espionage and theological cover-ups in the Middle Ages. To understand what's going on in the world, and in the Middle East especially, we readers now have to turn to nonfiction -- to instructive commentaries like Bernard Lewis's or to revealing autobiographical works like Azar Nafisi's ''Reading Lolita in Tehran'' or Irshad Manji's ''Trouble With Islam.'' They're not as much fun as novels, though, and they also lack that sulfurous whiff of cynicism and conspiracy that makes good thrillers so satisfying.

Novels take time to be written, and it's possible that the thriller writers simply haven't gotten around yet to Islamic terrorism or weapons trafficking. On the other hand, the first ''Da Vinci Code'' knockoff is already on the press (Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's ''Rule of Four,'' about some precocious Princeton students -- Umberto Ecos in training -- who decode a mysterious Renaissance manuscript), so at the very least the political-thriller people don't seem to be knocking themselves out.

A few years ago it was said that the end of the cold war had effectively finished the political thriller, but that doesn't seem to be true either. John le Carre, the master of the genre, is back at something close to the top of his form, with ''Absolute Friends.'' Another Brit, Robert Wilson, author of the superb ''Small Death in Lisbon,'' has a series set in West Africa -- a natural setting, it turns out, for stories of greed and corruption. (The most recent volume, ''The Big Killing,'' involves porn, diamond smuggling and civil war in Liberia.) And Alan Furst, the pre-eminent American practitioner, continues to turn out thrillers so sleek and stylish, so full of atmosphere, that they've become the upscale, art-house version of the form.

Most of these books are set in the past, though. Furst typically confines himself to Europe in the narrow, politically fraught slice of time between the Spanish Civil War and the mid-1940's. ''A Small Death in Lisbon'' finds the solution to the murder of the title in a little-known episode from World War II. ''Absolute Friends'' begins and ends in the present (ends, in fact, with a screed against America and our involvement in Iraq), but its best scenes and its most convincing descriptions of spycraft are set in cold-war Berlin.

It's tempting to conclude that the advantage of the historical perspective for the thriller writer is that it affords him greater certainty and moral clarity. We know how things turned out, and history has already decided for us who the heroes were and who the villains. But in fact these recent books suggest something else. They revisit the political landscape of the cold war and World War II -- so fixed in retrospect, so clearly demarcated in black and white -- and they muddy it. For one thing, they discover that history is never over, and that the crimes of the past live on in the present. They also find self-interest and mixed motives everywhere, and they upset our traditional notions of the right side and the wrong side. (Furst's most recent hero, for example, is a Russian Bolshevik working for a Hungarian spymaster to sabotage the fascists in France -- does that make him a good guy or a bad guy?)

In fact, the unspoken theme of all the really good political thrillers, if you think about them, is not good versus evil but pretty bad versus slightly worse. In many of these books, all intelligence is bad intelligence, or at least seriously flawed, and no one has the moral high ground. This was le Carre's great insight, and it is what made him, for most of the 70's, such an essential writer: that Karla and Smiley (and all the ''joes'' who worked for each of them) were more alike than different, and that they were neither saintly nor creepy -- they were just bureaucrats. They, and by extension all of us back then, breathed the same atmosphere, gray and depressing and so foggy that you couldn't see anything very clearly.

Clouds of that same atmosphere rise from the pages of our newspapers every day now, in swirls of mist so thick that they may have rendered the thriller writers temporarily redundant. All popular authors work with an eye on the market, and the thriller writers must sense that conspiracies and conspiracy theory are the last things many of us want to read about. We desperately want clarity and understanding, not more suggestions that ''intelligence'' is an oxymoron, and we seem to need to believe that our enemies are fundamentally different from ourselves. Perhaps we're not ready yet for fiction, or for the darker truths it tends to tell.

Charles McGrath is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

Source Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/magazine/15WWLN.html