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Literary Review
Americans don't die
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The insular world-view projected in DeMille's novels can be disturbing. Perhaps we, as readers, should suspend disbelief and put personal ideology to sleep. Yet, DeMille's own insistence on introducing larger moral and political questions complicates the issue, says SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI.
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LAST September, America declared in its National Security Strategy its right to stop any other State from acquiring military power "surpassing or equalling the power of the United States", its right to take pre-emptive action to maintain its hegemony, and its need for a large military budget to ensure "full spectrum dominance". What was most astonishing about these assertions was their complete disregard of any international curb on the use of power, and their chilling insistence on the military option as the best means of keeping the world in its place. Given the current American and British rhetoric on Iraq, and in the context of earlier American military adventures, perhaps we should not have been astonished, only appalled. It is now abundantly clear that the "global war on terrorism" is merely a pretext for the expansion of U.S. military presence throughout the world, the "first-strike" doctrine its chosen method for achieving a decisive role in global politics.
It is this position that provides the weltanschauung of the American political or military thriller, a form widely popular both in its print and its film versions. Sadly, the rhetoric that fuels political discourse is frequently indistinguishable from that which appears on the pages of international bestsellers or in the mouths of Hollywood actors. Even after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, George W. Bush, not at any time the most fluent of speakers, borrowed the language of the Western to describe the punitive action he intended against Afghanistan. As a result, international military ventures carrying enormous consequences in death and suffering can be absorbed into a mode of speaking that does not differentiate between the hyperbole appropriate to sensational fiction and the sober realities of human existence in a world fraught with terror and pain.
Is this the fault of the fiction itself? Surely not. Reality contaminates: fiction merely provides a set of possibilities. Nevertheless, the chilling contexts now available for the American political thriller might complicate our responses to it. Nelson DeMille's 11 international bestsellers, ranging in subject and style from the Cold War novel (The Charm School) to the psychological crime thriller with a military setting (The General's Daughter) to the post-Vietnam post-mortem (Word of Honour, Up Country) and the Arab terrorist tale (The Lion's Game), are now available at Indian prices. They are solid blocks of books, the shortest over 500 pages, the longest around 850. You can buy one at an airport and be fairly confident that it will last you, not just the duration of the flight, but probably the duration of the trip. They are reasonably well-written, directly narrated in a narrow but consistent set of registers (professional spy, New York cop, Vietnam veteran) and compellingly plotted. Descriptions of food, clothes, sex and some repetitive situations account for the length of the books; the more recent ones could easily be reduced by a third. DeMille is not Le Carre, not even Frederick Forsyth. It is not the quality of his writing that holds our attention, but his manipulation of events.
What is frightening about the books, though, is the world-view they project. It is one in which the American way of life, precariously exemplified in the figure of a hero characterised by the clichés of sensational fiction (brave, honest, attractive to women, invulnerable to physical harm), is protected against various international conspiracies to subvert or damage it. Yet this way of life is, we find, already compromised by its political masters, who are utterly ruthless, have no respect for human life, and unfortunately, are both stupid and devious. Each novel records a minor personal victory, held up as symbolic of the American spirit, against a series of major betrayals.
The paradigm thus established may be rooted in the author's own Vietnam experience; the veteran, let down by his government's withdrawal from the war, clings to that experience as evidence of his own and his comrades' heroism. But he has not acquired, in the interim, any sympathy for his opponents, or appreciation of their right to exist. Wherever he goes, he remains only a slightly modified version of the Ugly American: insulated in his own sense of cultural and physical superiority, contemptuous of alien food, life, landscape. DeMille's first Vietnam book, Word of Honour, succeeds by concentrating on the soldier's memory and experience to the exclusion of other factors; his latest, Up Country, brings the veteran back to Vietnam, as uninformed and xenophobic as before.
One could argue in DeMille's defence that the thriller genre demands a certain simplification of heroic traits, even of the crudely masculinist kind found in the "action" movie and characterised by DeMille's hero Paul Brenner. As readers, we must suspend disbelief, even put personal ideology to sleep, in order to enjoy the thrills of the chase. To some extent this is perfectly true. Yet the argument is complicated by DeMille's own insistence on introducing larger moral and political questions.
In Word of Honour this produces a powerful though simplified examination of the American military ethos. In the other books, DeMille offers, as proof of his engagement with the reality of American politics, a series of denouements showing the complicity of the highest authorities in exterminating human beings as evidence, covering up the sins of the past, or colluding with international terrorism. But this does not change the tenor of the main narrative, committed to the virtues of the action hero and his single-handed defence of the American way of life. The deep pessimism which infects the classic Cold War novel gives way to a complacence born of the hero's capacity to survive. In the end this is all that matters. Those who die are just other people; the thriller, like the action movie, can do without them. And so, George Bush would say, can America.
(Nelson DeMille's Word of Honour, The Charm School, The General's Daughter, The Lion's Game and Up Country are published by Time/Warner Books, 2000-2002. Distributed by Penguin India, £3.50 each.)
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