A profiteering arms dealer hopes to launch a new Cold War in a bestselling international thriller
The Whole Truth. By David Baldacci. Hachette/Vision, 530 pp., $9.99, paperback.
By Janice Harayda
Discouraged by those dismal stats counts, bloggers? Take heart. You actually have enough clout to push global superpowers to the brink of World War III. Or so David Baldacci suggests in The Whole Truth, a novel that reheats the conventions of the Cold War thriller for the age of viral posts and “perception management.”
Conflicts in the Middle East are too puny to satisfy the megalomaniac ambitions of arms dealer Nicholas Creel in the post-9/11 era. So he hires a perception-management (PM) expert to start a global crisis that will bring in enough weapons contracts to keep his yacht afloat off the coast of Italy in perpetuity. Creel’s point man ignites the tension by planting on the Web a video — purporting to describe Russian atrocities — that goes viral. Fears of a new Red Menace grow when 28 people are killed at a London think tank, apparently by Russian assassins. Evidence found on a hard drive at their office implicates China in the propaganda campaign against its Asian neighbor.
As Armageddon looms, two people stand up to Creel and his scheme: a rogue security agent who uses the single name of Shaw and a washed-up reporter, Katie James. They fight him with the help of high-tech gizmos and near-superhuman feats: surviving car chases, leaping from a second-story window, dodging a syringe full of tetrodotoxin, “over a thousand times more lethal than cyanide.”
All of it makes for a cynical tale despite Baldacci’s efforts to cast Shaw as a softie for a dead woman he loved. The Whole Truth has none of the patriotism that flavors the novels of Tom Clancy and other literary jingoists. Its writing is at times graceless and clichéd, if taut and well-paced. And Katie is one of the least credible female journalists in recent pop fiction – someone who, after two Pulitzers, doesn’t know that reporters speak of wanting their stories on “page one,” not on the “front page.”
But The Whole Truth has a big and timely idea behind it: Sometimes perceptions don’t affect reality — they become reality. And Baldacci makes his case for that view without the bluster and infestation of acronyms found in the work Clancy and many others. He also offers an interesting afterword on perception managers. “PMs are not spin doctors because they don’t spin facts,” Baldacci writes. “They create facts and then sell them to the world as truth.” He may exaggerate the perception-managers’ powers, but he’s right when he says that “a major untruth can be established so quickly and so overwhelmingly across the world” that no after-the-fact reporting can make most people believe it isn’t true: “And that’s precisely what makes it so dangerous.”
Best line: On Amsterdam’s Oude Kirk, or Old Church, the city’s oldest house of worship: “Shaw had been inside a few times. What had struck him was the series of carvings on the choir benches depicting men having massive bowel movements.”
Worst line: No. 1: “To say that this hit the earth like a molten-lava tsunami would have been the grossest of understatements.” No. 2: “Just like war, the Americans did not have a monopoly on self-serving politicians.” No. 3: “Much like the treatment of the Russians, few believed their denials.” No. 4: “on the frozen tundra.” No. 5: ” … she was now currently living in London …”
Published: April 2008 (hardcover), February 2009 (paperback).
Furthermore: Baldacci has written more than a dozen other novels, including Absolute Power. His publisher says that the The Whole Truth, a No. 1 bestseller, is his “first international thriller.”
Janice Harayda is a novelist, award-winning journalist and former book editor of the Plain Dealer in Cleveland. You can also follow her on Twitter (@janiceharayda). She satirizes American literary culture on her Fake Book News page (@FakeBookNews) on Twitter.
© 2010 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com
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