mark Jabbour's Blog - Posts Tagged "lying"
Good fiction
Bloodmoney: A novel of espionage (2011) David Ignatius
Last night I wanted a good book to read – some fiction – I read a lot of non-fiction but I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted a good story with some bite to it, not fluff or fantasy. I tried a Nora Roberts novel but that bordered on pushing me towards the edge—and jumping. I think what I was wanting was another book like Bloodmoney. It’s topical and about big ideas. It’s about people—people not like me but who live in the world, too. It’s about the craziness that is “The War on Terror.” It’s about one of my favorite subjects— lying, and the professional liars, the intelligence services, that sneak around the world trying to manipulate people into coming around to their (= the people who are in power in a particular place) point of view, or belief – which is that what they believe is The Truth. Something like tolerance, truth, and science doesn’t have much respect in the world of professional liars. That world isn’t really much different from the world of non-professional liars except for this: Smart people (professionals) lie to others, and stupid people (most everyone else) lie to themselves. Stupid people are dupes and rubes and victims and happy idiots who are exploited by smart people; and also about the contrast between two very different POVs. One is old, pre-literate, & closed (Afghanistan/Pakistan and all the other Stans), and the other (The US or us) is new, literate, and open – you might say “post-modern.” So we’ve got this crazy mix of old & new weapons of war about the oldest of wars – who gets to dominate who, which is ultimately about sex, money, power & revenge, motives for murder – the ultimate expression of dominance.
Ignatius isn’t the greatest of writers, not close, but not so bad so as to not be readable. His characters are flat and stereotyped. (Maybe archetypal is kinder.) In fact the CIA AD was Russell Crowe from Body of Lies, Ignatius’ previous “War on Terror” novel/movie. I think he changed the guy’s first name but his surname was the same. But this time the protagonist is a female USA spy. Yay. But she’s not very interesting. None of the characters are. They are flat, boring, my least favorite type of people in books and in real life – be they smart or stupid. My problem is I just don’t like liars – got little tolerance for it (See Degrees of Lying).
But, but, but, Ignatius is digging into something important here. According to him in the notes at the end of the book – the big idea here is how to go about ending war. And guess what? Yep, there are two different approaches, to that end, expressed by the different cultures – the old and the new. The old demands a face-to-face tête-à-tête. An asking for forgiveness and a granting of such. The new believes that face-to-face is blasé. That is: That when someone doesn’t agree with you can destroy them from a distance by bomb or blog, or if that doesn’t work, you can bribe them with cash via an envelope in a clandestine meet with an anonymous currier. One approach is intimate, say by rape and blade, and the other dispassionate, by bribe and bomb. So we fight about how we fight. And this is true. What we have here folks, when we dig down deep to the root of the tree in the garden
– is a failure to communicate. Good fiction.
Last night I wanted a good book to read – some fiction – I read a lot of non-fiction but I wasn’t in the mood. I wanted a good story with some bite to it, not fluff or fantasy. I tried a Nora Roberts novel but that bordered on pushing me towards the edge—and jumping. I think what I was wanting was another book like Bloodmoney. It’s topical and about big ideas. It’s about people—people not like me but who live in the world, too. It’s about the craziness that is “The War on Terror.” It’s about one of my favorite subjects— lying, and the professional liars, the intelligence services, that sneak around the world trying to manipulate people into coming around to their (= the people who are in power in a particular place) point of view, or belief – which is that what they believe is The Truth. Something like tolerance, truth, and science doesn’t have much respect in the world of professional liars. That world isn’t really much different from the world of non-professional liars except for this: Smart people (professionals) lie to others, and stupid people (most everyone else) lie to themselves. Stupid people are dupes and rubes and victims and happy idiots who are exploited by smart people; and also about the contrast between two very different POVs. One is old, pre-literate, & closed (Afghanistan/Pakistan and all the other Stans), and the other (The US or us) is new, literate, and open – you might say “post-modern.” So we’ve got this crazy mix of old & new weapons of war about the oldest of wars – who gets to dominate who, which is ultimately about sex, money, power & revenge, motives for murder – the ultimate expression of dominance.
Ignatius isn’t the greatest of writers, not close, but not so bad so as to not be readable. His characters are flat and stereotyped. (Maybe archetypal is kinder.) In fact the CIA AD was Russell Crowe from Body of Lies, Ignatius’ previous “War on Terror” novel/movie. I think he changed the guy’s first name but his surname was the same. But this time the protagonist is a female USA spy. Yay. But she’s not very interesting. None of the characters are. They are flat, boring, my least favorite type of people in books and in real life – be they smart or stupid. My problem is I just don’t like liars – got little tolerance for it (See Degrees of Lying).
But, but, but, Ignatius is digging into something important here. According to him in the notes at the end of the book – the big idea here is how to go about ending war. And guess what? Yep, there are two different approaches, to that end, expressed by the different cultures – the old and the new. The old demands a face-to-face tête-à-tête. An asking for forgiveness and a granting of such. The new believes that face-to-face is blasé. That is: That when someone doesn’t agree with you can destroy them from a distance by bomb or blog, or if that doesn’t work, you can bribe them with cash via an envelope in a clandestine meet with an anonymous currier. One approach is intimate, say by rape and blade, and the other dispassionate, by bribe and bomb. So we fight about how we fight. And this is true. What we have here folks, when we dig down deep to the root of the tree in the garden
– is a failure to communicate. Good fiction.
