Crisis - Frank Gardner

Frank Gardner is the BBC's Security Correspondent who was shot and disabled by terrorists whilst filming in Saudi Arabia in 2004. I became interested in him after watching a documentary series in which he set off, wheelchair and all, to see the birds of paradise in Borneo. So when I saw his first novel. I had to give it a try.

It's not his first book but it is a first novel and has some inevitable faults. His characterisation isn't great and there are scenes that don't need to be there. But it is the depth of knowledge behind the story that draws you in. The idea is a cracker: Colombian drug smugglers decide to take revenge on the Brits who disrupt their trade with a North Korean dirty bomb. Once the clock starts ticking, the device beloved of all the best thrillers, the book becomes thoroughly compelling, as good as any in the genre.


Before that things take their time. It's the inevitable compromise - you have to develop your characters and setting in sufficient detail to make your reader care about the outcome. Gardner's hero, who seems to be continuing in a second novel, is Luke Carlton, an identikit hero with an identikit name, a former Special Forces officer turned spy - which I guess must be a regular thing in real life.


Luke is a newbie at MI6 but he is the obvious man for the job because he was born and raised in Colombia (a prologue in which he loses his parents is one of the scenes I could happily dispense with). His girlfriend Elise and her subplot is a bore, but Luke suffers enough and makes sufficient gung-ho mistakes that we do come to care about his fate. The villains are pretty much the usual black hats - there is no need for them to be anything more. The most interesting characters are the officials at MI6 HQ in Vauxhall Cross (VX), especially Sayed 'Sid' Khan, the conflicted Head of Terrorism, and Luke's line manager Angela Scott.


Crisis is 550 pages. All bar about 50 of them are excellent. A very good debut but Gardner really needs to spend more time on characterisation and giving them more original names.


PS It has just dawned on me that the front cover gives away one of the plot twists. Duh!

Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I first read this novella when it came out in paperback in 1995.  I liked it then but, re-reading it now and having read much more Latin American literature, I loved it.

The structure is clever.  The prologue, which may or may not be true, tells us that as a young reporter Marquez was sent to report on the exhumation of corpses from the old Clarrisan convent in Cartagena.  While he is there, a tomb in the third niche of the high altar is cracked open and an ocean of red-gold hair spills out.  A skull follows, the skull of a teenage girl.  The inscription tells us that this was once Sierva Maria de Todos Los Angeles.  The remainder of the book is her story.

Back in the late Eighteenth Century Sierva was the only child of an elderly decayed marquis and his crazy bulimic wife.  Sierva has been left to run wild with the slaves.  One day, when she is twelve years old, she is nipped on the ankle by a rabid dog.  Nothing happens but the marquis becomes obsessed with the idea that his daughter is going to go mad and die.  Eventually, after his wife has left him, he places Sierva in the convent where the abbess immediately concludes she is possessed.  The bishop sends his protege Cayetano Delaura to exorcise her.  Instead, he falls in love with the child.

The atmosphere of sweltering decay - the exploration of an alien, debased society imposed on layers and layers of native culture - is spellbinding.  There is a sense of a fairytale, or moral fable, yet it remains of novel of character tested in extremis.  Utterly compelling.