It’s funny that just as I learned about the Mahdi, through my reading about the Mahdist War in Sudan, that I would pick up a book to read featuring that prophesy as a plot point. Funny also that I can find little to praise said book about outside of the odd alignment in my personal entertainment tastes.
OK. So Shock Warning by Michael Walsh wasn’t bad enough that I actually set the book aside. I did finish it and, well, the second half of the book was an improvement on the first. That it took that long to find its footing, though, is a bit unforgivable.
When I read Hostile Intent, as I explained at the time, I came about by virtue of looking up a non-fiction work by author Michael Walsh. I had read a positive review of Last Stands but didn’t want to pay top dollar for the newly-released work. When I read he was also an author of fiction, I decided to give that a try as a penny-pinching substitute.
In the time since, I’ve also read a few of Walsh’s opinion pieces – either online or in print. In many ways, I agree with his politics and his cultural outlook. I soured on him a bit when he went hard* into the never-Trump camp a few years back. This latter discovery came after the whole buy-his-book exercise, though. At that prior and more innocent time, I thought I’d like to support his politics by financially supporting his writing.
I hinted at it then but I found Hostile Intent to be a decent-enough story marred, a bit, by some idiosyncratic writing. By the time I got to Shock Warning, it felt like Walsh’s prose was almost all idiosyncrasy and very little story.
Part of my problem is that it’s been a year or two since I finished the second of the three volumes in the series. I must have checked back at least half-a-dozen times to confirm that, yes, I did read the preceding novel (Early Warning, if you’re keeping score). Although it has only been a year or so, I had forgotton most of that story. Worse yet, the first half of the Shock Warning has almost constant, yet partial, references to plot points from the earlier works. It left me confused.
Contrast with the third book in the Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum demonstrates a better way of continuing a serial novel – one that isn’t exactly a “trilogy” or written to be multi-volume** work. I picked up that novel from the library shortly after finishing Shock Warning and am reading it as I type today. Ludlum’s solution was to structure one of the early chapters as a meeting between a long-time character and several several new colleagues. Those newcomers must be brought up to speed on just who is Jason Bourne and what has he done to bring us all to this juncture. Over a handful of pages we read a concise summary of the first two novels placing new readers, as well as those of us who read book two but forgot much of it, together on the same (ahem) page. I don’t know how well it would have worked for if I hadn’t read the first two novels, but the technique was certainly enough to refresh my memory.
But back to Shock Warning. On top of the constant reflections on the prior works, it didn’t help that the plot itself was confusing – or at least it was to me. The narrative was trying to imply some sort of supernatural or even religious event taking place. I guess it was probably even meant to be disorienting but it had the effect of disorienting me, as the reader, rather than as an observer of events. It’s a difficult distinction, but I hope you get my drift.
If that weren’t enough, I’m even more attuned to how Walsh gives his “conservative” characters soliloquies in which to summarize all that is wrong with today’s America. Was it worse in part three than in the first two novels or have I just reached some sort of limit? Hard to say without doing some technical analysis; something else I have no appetite for. Let’s just say that subtlety can be virtue, Mr. Walsh.
The Wikipedia entry explains that Walsh planned two additional novels beyond this, the third installment. Wikipedia doesn’t source this tidbit but I have to think it came from a decade or so ago when Shock Warning was fresh. I wonder if the lack of sustained success for the book series has put an end to the career of super-spy Devlin and his one-man crusade to save the world from Nazis, terrorists, and neo-communists. Maybe that would be for the best.
While I am at it (and even while I still have a ways to go to finish this book), I’ll tell you I think The Bourne Ultimatum is also a shadow of that original, first book in the series. Although the “story so far” chapter handled that hurdle admirably, the events in this third (and final) book of the Bourne just don’t have the same magic of that original. Maybe I’ve got Carlos the Jackal burnout or maybe the 80s-era psychobabble hasn’t aged well.
Or maybe the movie makers were onto something when they decided to depart from the Bourne novels, using just Ludlum’s original titles and main character to craft a (slightly) more interesting series of thrillers.
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*In case it’s not clear from my other posts, I’m a bit ambivalent when it comes to our former president. When I criticize the likes of Walsh, it is not because he is insufficiently supportive of a popular politician or even that I think he is wrong in the details of his critique. My issue is that too many people felt compelled to use their pre-existing soapbox to “speak out” against Trump’s failings and then got swept away in the mania of that fight. It felt, to me, like Walsh had succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s always better not to be deranged.
**I can’t tell if, by trying to be concise, I’m obscuring what I meant to say. A true trilogy, like Lord of the Rings or an even longer series (think A Song of Ice and Fire or The Expanse) is written as a single story, simply broken up into multiple volumes. Whether that’s so they can be published over time or just to make them easier to carry around – I supposed that depends upon when they were written. Written in this style, the books can assume the reader is following the whole series in order. Contrast with the character or “universe” themed books, where each book must function either as a series or as a stand-alone. As we’ve seen, these books can build up so much baggage as to make the execution difficult.