Never,
by Ken Follett.
In a preface to his
latest epic tale, Ken Follett tells us that when he was researching ‘Fall of
Giants’, the first of a trilogy of novels beginning with the First World War,
he was shocked to find that ‘that was a war that nobody wanted. No European
leader on either side intended for it to happen. But the emperors and prime ministers, one by
one, made logical, moderate decisions – each of which took us a small step
closer to the most terrible conflict the world had ever known. I came to believe that it was all a tragic
accident.’
‘And I wondered:
could that happen again?’
Which is the premise for ‘Never’, starting in the North
African country of Chad in the Sahara desert, its population impoverished and entirely
dependent for their existence on the huge but shrinking Lake that is their
Oasis. Because of Jihadi terrorist
activity in the region, the USA and France have secret agents stationed in N’Djamena,
Chad’s capital city, and Mr Follett starts the action with several rounds of
confrontations between the good guys and the terrorists to set the scene – and
no-one does blood and gore better than he, but this is just a preliminary round,
for the American President is soon drawn into the fray when it is discovered
that the jihadis were using weapons supplied by China: how did they get them? Who sold them? Where did the money come from?
Questions that don’t receive satisfactory answers, and
the situation is compounded by the Supreme Leader of North Korea deciding to
rattle a sabre or three by flaunting his possession of missiles with nuclear
warheads: he’s a loose cannon that China
definitely doesn’t need as an ally, but fate has added a further complication: the female president of South Korea has
decided it’s her destiny to invade North Korea and unite the Korean people once
and for all, ‘before she dies’. She has
the military hardware, backed by the USA, and the single-minded conviction that
it is her God-Given right: how can she
fail?
Mr Follett is an economical, no-frills writer; he writes short sentences and relies on the
reader to form their own mental pictures of his characters, but his research is
meticulous and his ratcheting-up of tension throughout this mighty tome (you
need strong wrists – 816 pages) is heart-in-the-mouth stuff, especially when we
compare our current worrying times with what should be a work of fiction.
Nuclear War, coming soon to a place near you. ( God forbid!) FOUR STARS.
No comments:
Post a Comment