Beware of the Yoghurt!

So, I was in Las Vegas (I write that like it’s a routine occurence, which it isn’t), my flight back to Heathrow was delayed by five hours and I was suddenly in danger of running out of books to read on the plane back to London (only another 500 pages left of Under the Dome). I didn’t want to buy just any old airport novel – you know the sort of thing, about a lawyer or a cop or an ex-soldier thrust into a web of intrigue and danger, etc – and Ralph Peters’s The War After Armageddon looked like it was borderline SF-y and post-apocalyptic (my brain picked up on the subtle clue in the title)… So that’s why I bought it.

And while it indeeds borders on being post-apocalyptic SF it does not actually cross that border in any meaningful way. As the blurb makes clear, the story takes place in an ugly near-future: Wahabist bombings have taken place across Europe, a fanatically fundamentalist regime has been elected in the States, LA and Vegas have been nuked and a new Caliphate has eradicated Israel as a state. However, all this has already happened by the start of the novel, which is almost entirely set in Palestine as various US forces (Army, Marines, and a new Christian militia) struggle to reclaim the area, dealing with political machinations and devious stratagems from both the enemy and their own government along the way.

And the author clearly knows his onions – in his notes he apologises for over-simplifying the details and jargon, but I was still following the vague tune rather than understanding every word. Experts on things military may well have lapped it up but I found it rather dry and colourless. Despite the inclusion of various maps it’s tricky to keep a grasp on the exact details of the manoeuvering going on.

So it’s all a bit technical and macho, albeit convincingly so. A more serious problem is that I couldn’t help feeling I was being preached at all the way through – Peters has an agenda, which he makes clear from the dedication page onwards – ‘To those who solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,’ he intones, and if there was a font named Grave you can bet he would’ve used it.

And as a result, the Moslem characters in this novel get off fairly lightly – the real demons in human form are the fundamentalist Christians who are enthusiastically amalgamating Church and State, and who are more or less completely unscrupulous bastards. Now this may cause a problem for Peters, in that many of the constitution-revering folks he’s dedicated his book to are probably Tea Party-supporting churchgoers, and who may object to the depiction of Christians in this book – but as I say, that’s his problem. My problem is that if you’re going to start writing books purporting to be fictional accounts of realistic, though doom-laden, possible events then they have to be credible possible events.

I’m no great fan of the Christian right – and that’s putting it extremely mildly – but I still refuse to believe they’re capable of the atrocities they get up to in this book: the cold-blooded murder of other Americans, let alone the ideological purge carried out by nuke that events finally build up to. Wouldn’t it be terrible if psychotic fundamentalist maniacs took over the country and turned it into a theocracy? seems to be the question Peters is posing. Well, yes, obviously it would. It would also be terrible if the world’s cement turned into yoghurt overnight and all the houses fell down, but that’s no reason to start scaremongering about it, not least because it’s an absurd idea.

(If, of course, I turn out to be wrong, and many years after I write you’re reading an illicit copy of this Forbidden Text while in hiding from the Hounds of God – well, what can I say? Oops. Greetings from the past. I hope Doctor Who is still running.)

I don’t really care that the writer is positioning himself rather awkwardly, as a right-winger trying to sound warning bells against people only slightly more right-wing than he is. My concern is this book as a work of fiction, and it’s really only so-so. If you like lots of detailed military jargon and descriptions of different kinds of action, coupled with political goings-on you’ll probably rather enjoy it. Personally I found those characters who weren’t implausible to all be a bit samey and stereotypical, and the events – as I’ve said – to be somewhat overblown.

The lesson Peters wanted me to take away from this book was, I think, that one should take personal responsibility for the protection of one’s liberties, or risk losing them forever. The lesson I actually took away was that sometimes one should take a chance on running out of things to read – it’s not like you can ever get too much sleep while flying from one continent to another, is it?