Empire, by Orson Scott Card (2006) (Publisher: Tom Doherty/TOR)
Maybe there's a great novel out there which chronicles a new American civil war fought not on lines of North and South, but Left and Right. This book isn't that novel. Spoilers below.
You can usually tell a novelist hasn't done his or her job terribly effectively if they feel compelled to include an Afterword which explains just what the novel you've just read is actually about. In this case, Orson Scott Card, after spending 340 hardcover pages telling his at times pedantic story, nevertheless sees a need to delineate again that political rhetoric in the US is approaching a tipping point where resort to arms is, if not inevitable, at least likely. It's the Powerpoint presentation style of storytelling: tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you just told them. That may make MBA students giddy, but it makes for a lousy novel.
The premise is enough to make sci-fi fans, alt-history fans and fans of just plain stories salivate: what if the polarized American polity ruptured into warring factions based on crude "Red State" / "Blue State" ideologies? There would seem to be a lot that could be done with that. Unfortunately, almost none of it is done in this book. Part of the reason may be revealed in the Afterword: the book was written as part of a proposed "entertainment franchise", set to include video games and other unspecified products. Virtually any story would suffer from being hemmed in by a business plan.
The most obvious problems with Card's story are, first, the characters are essentially just vehicles for plot points, and, second, very little of the reactions of the inhabitants of the story's world ring very true. Many of the characters are entirely interchangeable: the contingent of military "good guys" are only distinguishable by nicknames and, at least in the case of the two primary protagonists, family relations: one is married with kids, the other isn't. After that, they're all just monickers. Moreover, certainly for the first half of the book, the characters are little more than pinballs, ricocheting from one plot point to another, occasionally spouting off point/counterpoint musings meant to count as philosophical.
As fundamental as the lack of enjoyable characters are, what struck me as even more of a problem is that the way the world unfolds just doesn't read plausibly. What sets everything off is a terrorist attack on the White House which kills the President and members of his Cabinet (the VP is killed in a separate attack on his car) - but nobody seems terribly perturbed by any of this. There is little or no emotional or psychological reaction among the characters chronicled, and even the broader world seems to trundle along as if nothing more important than another pop tart entering rehab has occurred - there are references to the news channels providing wall-to-wall coverage, but there is no visceral impact arising from a major terror attack on the seat of the US government. When New York City is taken over by the forces of the "Progressive Restoration" (using mechanoid invaders), again, nobody seems to much care - the narrative describes the "wait and see" approach taken by the diplomatic corps of other countries, but you get almost no sense that either the primary characters or anyone else in the United States reacts to this series of events with either surprise, outrage, happiness, disbelief, shock, anger or any other recognizable emotion. Everybody just moves along to the next milestone in the plot.
Partly, too, the story suffers from a certain reticence of narrative: except for one scene (which we later discover was a put-on), none of the characters speak with any real vehemence - in other words, we're never given a real sense of quite why everyone is so pissed off at the other side. The story is told from the point of view of two Special Ops agents who find themselves enmeshed in a treasonous conspiracy and then need to fight to take down the leader of the Progressive Restoration - but the protagonists are largely reacting to events carried out by others. It would have been nice to be inside the head of one of the combatants on the Progressive Restoration side, rather than seeing everything from the point of view of the eminently reasonable protagonists. To take another simple example, it's exceedingly odd that the name "Bush" never crosses anyone's lips. It's clear from the descriptions that the assassinated president is meant to be Bush (e.g., the story takes place sometime between now and the 2008 primaries, the president in question (along with members of his Cabinet) is a Republican who is widely despised by members of the media, the American public and other world leaders), but something is lost when the acknowledgement is never explicitly made (by contrast, "Clinton" is dropped on more than one occasion). The whole "civil war", from the bombing of the White House to the surrender of the Progressive Restoration forces, lasts something like a month, with a few dozen people killed - not exactly the most gripping war you'll ever encounter.
What makes the experience of reading the book especially frustrating is that it is at its best when it strays completely from its central selling point: when, in the last one-half to one-third, it becomes a fairly standard action-thriller, you can't help but get caught up in the excellent pacing - but you presumably didn't (well, I certainly didn't) pick this up looking for a good Mack Bolan yarn. A reader shouldn't have to wait until page 170 of a 340 page book before becoming engrossed. And the ending of the book is really quite good - the final thirty pages, with the revelation of what may be a murky conspiracy-behind-the-conspiracy, effects the sort of dread of the unknown which the preceding 300 pages should have been doing.
Grade: D+
Recommendation: Don't Bother (on the Buy/Borrow/Don't Bother metric)
Ouch. You know, before he got all ideological, Card wrote some pretty good sci-fi, particularly short stories. Too bad.
Posted by: Dr.Dawg | September 22, 2009 at 10:07 PM