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Stroud grabs you from start to finish
Book Review
By Derryll White
Stroud, Carsten (2004). Cobraville.
Carsten Stroud is an excellent storyteller. Each of his novels that I have read have wrapped me up in the tension and action he creates in flawless prose. ‘Cobraville’ is no exception. If you like political intrigue, a new look or terrorism, and a re-examination of the idea of family, this book is for you.
Some readers may feel uncomfortable, now and then, with America’s dabbling in the affairs of other nations. I have, ever since the Vietnam war. ‘Cobraville’ takes the lid off some of these feelings with this story of a C.I.A. covert mission in the Philippines confronting a U.N. peacekeeping force. This novel combines terrorism and intrigue in ways that reflect today’s world.
Stroud has it all here – scheming politicians, unconscionable international terrorists, tangential love interests and so many levels of intrigue that the reader sometimes struggles to sort it all. ‘Cobraville’ is an adventure into darkness. Think Paris last month, 9/11 – all of the horrors of our modern world. How do these events happen? Stroud has a theory.
In his normal fashion, the author takes the time to develop his characters thoroughly. The reader believes that the research is valid. Senator Drew Langan and his son Cole, a covert C.I.A. operative, go back and forth as only father and son can. The chair of the Senate Intelligence Oversight Committee, Helen McDowell, becomes as evil a political scumbag as modern fiction offers – totally reprehensible. It is all executed with a tight, muscular language that never fails to amp up the action, chapter-by-chapter.
Cole Langan’s Special Collections Service squad embodies all that any reader has ever thought about mercenaries and alpha male military types. They are committed, loyal, and dedicated to the mission. The humour throughout is hard and merciless, but always present.
‘Cobraville’ reads well, the kind of book that grabs the reader – start to finish. There are some scenes that the reader fights to keep within the realm of fiction, they are so reprehensible, but hints of reality always pulled me back to visioning the unthinkable. It is a hard and nasty world out there, beyond the Columbia Basin. I did like this book and will seek out more of Carsten Stroud’s work.
****
Excerpts from the novel:
WAR ON TERROR – …the Hill was trying to get the current Administration to define an endgame, a point where the States could get out of the ugly – and so far worse than thankless – task of saving Western Civilization, without any substantial success. The idea that American soldiers were out in the global swamp trying to reshape a hell-bound world into a Republican pipe dream of good order was a constant goad to him.
GOD – “We’re told,” said Strackbein, “that God requires the suffering of the world. In penance. And for the salvation of our souls.”
“So we are endlessly told,” said Desaix, nodding. “I often wonder why God is represented to us as a deity so addicted to suffering. God as a connoisseur of human grief. Such a God would truly be a monster, if He existed at all.”
“That’s not my God,” said Cole, a lapsed Episcopalian.
LUXURY – Drew had the rented Cadillac Escalade pretty well figured out by the time he left the airport, and now that he was closing in on Beltsville he was deeply in lust with it. Maybe the Republicans were onto something. His last family vehicle was a pious little Geo that ran on a fifty-fifty mix of Evian water and sanctimony. Every time you gassed up an urban tank like this you got an autographed picture of the Sultan of Brunei. You were so high off the ground that you could look down through a car’s open sunroof and see the bald spots on the driver’s skull. That kind of thing gave you power.
TERRORISM – “He doesn’t want the children. He wants our despair – he wants us to strike out – to run berserk in the marketplaces of Iligan and Cotobato and Marawi – and so justify our extermination. Why does he seek this? Because we are not believers. Therefore we must be eradicated. All the great movements of the world require this sacrament of death. You were in Vietnam sergeant, were you not?”
BELIEF – “As I have said – belief – enthusiastic, energetic expansive belief – always requires sustained campaigns of ceremonial brutality. That is how the killers are exalted. They kill in order to become divine, to achieve the coldness that they see in God. Hussein’s Ba’athists said they used torture and killing to bring their brothers to their tru selves, of which they were ignorant. We Jesuits made our name during the Great Inquisition. We tortured to purify. This great sin lies at the heart of all religions, in their early pride, in the genetic code of their origins. They sanctify themselves with the blood of others, the more innocent the better.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
