A FORSYTH SAGA

Michael M. Thomas

In thriller writing today, as “Control” would put it to Smiley, there are the rest of them and then there is le Carre.

Among the also-rans, Frederick Forsyth secured for himself quite a high niche in popular esteem with The Day of the Jackal, a thriller made perhaps more memorable than it deserved to be by a dashing film. In Jackal, and to some extent in the two that followed, Forsyth performed decently enough. Feet held to the fire by a glorious tradition which included Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Dornford Yates, Geoffrey Household, Eric Ambler, Leslie Charteris, Hammond Innes, Graham Greene, Ian Fleming, and (until recently) Alistair MacLean and Geoffrey Jenkins, and by what remained of a literate, discerning audience, he at least managed to tell an original, sometimes absorbing, not totally preposterous story.

Alas, the tradition is now in disrepair, and thus Mr. Forsyth can flaunt his ineptitude. Not that his prospective audience deserves any better. Thriller buffs these days have made the execrable Robert Ludlum a wealthy man. Literacy and phosphorescent imaginativeness are not required. What they want are facts, or nonfacts: spurious topicality and the pretense of information. They think that nomenclature and terminology are acceptable substitutes for narrative and characterization. They know little, and care less, about decent writing.

Forsyth’s new novel. The Fourth Protocol (Viking), is designed, almost insultingly, to pander to this audience. It takes a plausible, engaging premise— a plan by the Russkies to cause a nuclear “accident” in England to destabilize the Western alliance—and does it near unto death with technobabble. The story is halted frequently so that the author can tell us, in the manner of a plodding, provincial teacher fumbling among his lantern slides, what he has looked up or been told about the Russian, British, and South African intelligence bureaucracies; about how to build your own backyard one-and-a-half-kiloton nuke; about the rules of order of the Labour Party in England. It's shaky stuff. The balance, where Forsyth seems to write about scenes he’s actually witnessed, isn’t altogether bad, although for the anticlimactic chase the reader who can make it that far is advised to have a road map of Great Britain close at hand.

About these hedgerows of received information, the principal characters play a tired round of Where's the Bomb Hidden?, a diversion one had hoped had been exhausted in Collins and Lapierre’s equally awful The Fifth Horseman. All the Englishmen have names like “Sir Nigel" and seem constantly to be having lunch at White’s, and the Russians all call each other things like “Pyotr Pyotrovich” in a rapid fire of Slavic diminutives which would daunt even Danny Kaye. The British agents try to figure out whether they belong to K2(B) Section or C5(C) or God knows what other unimportant letter-and-number combination. There are numerous bows to le Carre; even Smiley’s beloved Connie Sachs has been pinched, reappearing as Blodwyn.

The Fourth Protocol is a formula book written by a brand-name author for a formula audience. It is sure to be hailed in the Russian Tea Room as a million-dollar “property.” It will be a huge success.