IAN SANSOM takes a look at the Christmas blockbuster crop, and finds Frederick Forsyth the best of a bad lot
HAVING thoroughly pursued my researches, I can report that the hyped-up, hard-sell hardback tends to have a funny smell. It’s not the smell of the boards and glue, it’s the smell of mediocrity. This despite the best efforts of pop culture analysts – with their natural resistance to hierarchical valuations – to make it seem otherwise. I wish it was. On the other hand, like millions of others, I did keep on reading …
Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Her Own Rules (HarperCollins, R99,95), for example, stinks to high heaven. The book’s heroine, Meredith Stratton, blessed with a “pleasant demeanour” and a “winning natural charm”, is the owner of a chain of international inns – Havens Incorporated.
She falls in love with a man called Luc de Montboucher who owns a chateau. She is also reunited with her long lost mother. The plot is laughably flimsy, the characters have ridiculous names (most with surnames for first names) and the writing is sheer flapdoodle.
There is page after page of nonsense and padding, of which just a few examples will suffice: “Hilltops, the inn Meredith owned near Sharon, was built on top of a hill, as its name suggested” … “Being an architect and a designer he was an extremely visual man, and so it was her looks which had initially attracted him to her” … “It was a coup de foudre, as the French are wont to say”.
Her Own Rules is a pile of crap, as the English are wont to say.
Anne Rice’s Servant of the Bones (Chatto & Windus, R89,95) is nonsense of an altogether different kidney. Her books about the vampire Lestat are quite good, but this new novel, about a rebel ghost called Azriel who retells a large part of the history of the world to an elderly and confused academic, lacks the bite of the vampire novels. There are some interesting insights into Babylonian history, however, and plenty of Rice’s trademark homo- or haemo-eroticism.
Which brings us nicely to Clive Barker’s Sacrament (HarperCollins, R89,95), a humourless and pretentious book about a gay wildlife photographer called Will Rabjohns whose life is dogged by his youthful encounter with two strange succubus-type figures who now roam the world having sex and killing people willy-nilly.
The description of the gay scene in America – where the British Barker now lives – is convincing. As he puts it so eloquently himself: “To every hour, its mystery. At dawn, the riddles of life and light. At noon, the conundrums of solidity. At three, in the hum and heat of the day, a phantom moon, already high. At dusk, memory. And at midnight? Oh, then the enigma of time itself; of a day that will never come again passing into history while we sleep.”
Sacrament might be of some interest to adolescents undergoing sexual and spiritual crises.
Older readers might enjoy Robert Ludlum’s The Cry of the Halidon (HarperCollins, R89,95), although it seems unlikely. The book trudges its way through an incredibly dull story about a bunch of surveyors in Jamaica who get caught up in a battle between local tribespeople and developers. It might more accurately be titled The Cry of the Mogadon.
Much more lively and interesting is Frederick Forsyth’s Icon (Bantam, R99), a book which smells fresh and fragrant in comparison with all the others. While Ludlum is billed by his publishers as “the world’s number one bestselling author”, Forsyth is rather more modestly described as “the master storyteller”. Yet in this clash of the titans, a kind of mass culture version of “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky”, Forsyth undoubtedly comes out on top.
Icon is pacey, intelligent genre fiction from the former foreign correspondent and author of The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs of War. The plot concerns the emergence of a right-wing demagogue in Russia, and is packed full of ex-CIA and KGB men doing the Cold War things they still do best.
Of course, these books can only really be judged as products – written, packaged and marketed to make maximum cash. Judging by the size and prominence of the author photos, what the writers look like has some bearing on these matters, yet only Forsyth looks anything like a writer you’d want to give any money to. Bradford looks like a chat-show hostess, Ludlum like Rupert Murdoch, Anne Rice like Mystic Meg, and Clive Barker a cross between Hugh and Richard E Grant.
But, if you squint a bit in the half-light and hold the book away from you, Forsyth looks a little like Vladimir Nabokov.