The Ghost War Best Price $12.45

While I was in college, I did not have a great deal of time to spend on recreational reading. I worked at two jobs through most of my college years, and so when I wasn't studying or delivering furniture or driving an ambulance or washing cars, I was usually sleeping or eating. But even with my limited available time, I was able to read occasionally, and if I were to be honest with myself, I would have to admit that there were times when I allowed reading to interfere with studying.

 

In those days I had three favorite writers: James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and Robert Ludlum. I know. I know. Those three writers are widely diverse in their subject matter, and many literary purists would very much like to beat me severely about the head and shoulders for mentioning Robert Ludlum in the same sentence with Cooper and Dickens. But I loved the three of them then, and I still love them today.

 

The novels of Robert Ludlum are not literary classics on a level that competes with Dickens or Cooper, but they are good entertainment. With the reading of my first Ludlum novel, The Parsifal Mosaic, I became hooked on the spy thriller genre of novels. Ludlum passed away several years ago, and even before his death his writing had been curtailed by declining health. So I have been looking for a writer to take his place.

 

Of course, there are the works of Tom Clancy and I have read and enjoyed all of his novels. But it has been a great while since Clancy has published one of his tomes. I have read all of Vince Flynn's works, and while I can say that I enjoyed them, I should also say that Flynn does not provide all of the complicated plot twists that I came to expect from both Ludlum and Clancy. And I have to say that I have not yet begun to like Mitch Rapp, the main character in Flynn's novels.

 

I think that I have stumbled upon a writer who, if he continues to write spy thrillers, and if he can control his desire to insert awkward political commentary into his novels, will have as much success as Ludlum. His name is Alex Berenson and his latest novel is The Ghost War.

Mr. Berenson is a reporter for The New York Times. Since it has been well-documented that large portions of the reporting in The New York Times is fictional, it should not surprise anyone that a reporter for that paper would be a superior fiction writer. I suppose that fabricating a column on a regular basis would provide a writer with great plot development skills. I can imagine Berenson and Jayson Blair getting together and swapping ideas on various fictional characters and places. You will recall that Jayson Blair was the Times reporter who was finally fired from his job after it was determined that he completely fabricated portions of thirty-six of his reports. Now that I have made my gratuitous attack on The New York Times, I will return to discussing the book.

Actually, there is one scene in The Ghost War that takes a clever jab at The New York Times and provides a glimpse at the wit of Mr. Berenson. The scene involves a press conference held by the President's press secretary, and in attendance at the press conference is a New York Times reporter named Dan Spiegel. Berenson describes Spiegel as “smart, but not as smart as he thought himself to be,” and who “liked hearing the sound of this own voice,” and who “believed mistakenly that he was as important as the people he wrote about.” I like a writer who does not take himself too seriously, and Mr. Berenson seems to qualify as just such a writer.

A specific example of Berenson's superior character development skills can be found in the character of a homeless Chinese man named Jordan. I was moved by the poignant and realistic depiction of this young man's attitude and the conditions that he endured.

It seems to me that in order for a fictional spy in a spy thriller novel to be well-liked, that spy needs to have a tortured soul. It seems as though we need for these fictional characters to be constantly battling the mental anguish that they suffer as a result of the shadowy, bloody world in which they live, and they must always be questioning the morality of their work and the authority that orders them to do their work. For example, Ludlum's character, Jason Bourne, is one of the most successful and famous spy characters ever created and is without a doubt the character who has the most tortured soul. It would be difficult to imagine a character with more soul-searching angst than a man who lost his memory and had to alternately deal with the idea that he might be a paid assassin or that he might be a government operative. The mental anguish that he suffers as he seeks to reconcile himself to slowly learned and sometimes conflicting facts makes him a man with which we can somehow empathize.

The main character in The Ghost War, John Wells, is also a tortured soul who is at times troubled by his past actions and is at times conflicted by his personal morality which allows him to take actions which he considers to be moral, but which may not be legal. This internal conflict makes me like him immediately. Indeed, in the acknowledgements for the book, Berenson refers to Wells' tortured soul and acknowledges the help of a Dr. Jacqueline Basha who assisted him in writing about the internal conflict. Actually, Berenson refers to his own personal torture when he says that “without Jackie, John Wells – and his creator – would be a lot more tortured.”

We do not know anything about the nature of Berenson's personal torture that required Dr. Basha's assistance, but we do see evidence of his internal conflict in attempting to rise above the baser instincts that are second nature to a New York Times reporter. For the majority of the novel, Berenson is indeed able to rise above the sophomoric writing that seems ingrained in all Times reporters, but in one particular paragraph he fails miserably in his attempt.

In The Ghost War, Berenson writes one paragraph that is one of the most utterly moronic paragraphs that I have read in quite some time, and since I read hundreds of books every year, I do tend to encounter quite a number of moronic paragraphs. John Wells has been captured and is about to undergo extreme physical torture. As he contemplates the coming days and hours when he is likely to be beat severely, castrated, have fingers and toes cut off, have eyes poked out, etc., he contemplates the possibility that his coming torture may be “primordial justice” for President Bush having flown out to the USS Abraham Lincoln in May of 2003 and having had his picture taken with the “Mission Accomplished” sign in the background. I am not making this up. It seems that Berenson needed to prove to all of his Times colleagues and his leftist buddies that he still believes the “President George Bush is the root cause of all evil in this world” mantra.

I should mention that The Ghost War is a sequel, and I have not yet read the book, The Faithful Spy, which preceded it. But Berenson does a masterful job of preventing any loose ends, so you will not feel any loss of content or connection if you read the sequel first.

Berenson leaves little doubt that there will be a sequel to The Ghost War, and we can be fairly certain that the storyline will to some degree involve an arms dealer bent on revenge for the rough manner in which he was treated by Wells. I will purchase that book when it is published, and I can recommend The Ghost War as a good read. But I will say that if Berenson becomes any more moronic or obtrusive with his political commentary, I will quickly begin searching for another replacement for the Ludlum vacancy.

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The Ghost War Alex Berenson

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