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Karna Small Bodman’s political thriller CHECKMATE is an impressive first novel, and a courageous investigation about the dangers of the arms race. In its insights, it recalls one of the classics of the arms-race fable: Dr Seuss’s THE BUTTER BATTLE BOOK. Bodman’s command of plotting and theme are strong, but I wish her characterizations were more complex. In CHECKMATE, America is still at war with Al-Qaeda, here represented by an uncannily familiar elderly fundamentalist cleric hiding in a cave in the mountains of the Indian subcontinent. He’s not named Osama, but the analogy is crystal clear. He and his gang have stolen three cruise missiles from Pakistan, and fired one at India; they intend to frame the Pakistani government for this attack and so foment a world-ending war between the two nuclear powers. The other two missiles are missing – but Bodman soon lets us know who has them. At the same time, Bodman introduces a brilliant female scientist, Dr Cameron 'Cammy' Talbot. She's the developer of a secret new missile defence system, known as Q3 or “boomerang”, which catches missiles, identifies them, and throws them back at their launch locations, and is the US government’s resident genius. She’s also attracted to her mysterious new colleague from India, Raj Singh. But is Raj interested in Cammy for the right reasons? As the Islamic militants chase Cammy and she struggles for success, peace, love, natural security, and the preservation of humanity, the pages race by. However, Cammy is the perfect American superwoman, and Bodman oversimplifies the problem she is trying to solve. For example, Cammy claims that her invention cannot be used by America’s enemies to repel U.S. attacks, because “what we’re designing is really aimed at what foreign countries are using now.” That ignores the fact that many “foreign countries” and rogue regimes use American-made weapons. If Cammy is simplistically good, her Al-Qaeda nemesis, the rank-and-file operative Jambaz, is simplistically evil. In the undergraduate American History class he is sitting through, for student-visa purposes, at Washington DC’s American University, Jambaz scorns the professor’s praise for the US Constitution’s protection of freedom of religion. ”Freedom of religion. What is that?” he silently muses. “There is but one God, Allah. And Muhammad, Peace Be Unto Him, is his messenger.” I found this moment very heavy-handed. If you look at Islamicist propaganda on the internet, a great deal of it attacks the US by claiming that America shows no respect for the freedom of the world’s Muslims to practice their religion in peace. Whether or not that claim is accurate, our president’s speeches about divine favor and manifest destiny do little to combat the appeal of such propaganda. I am no international politics expert, but I would suspect that few rank-and-file militants consciously agree with their enemies that they are fighting for the destruction, rather than the implementation, of 'freedom.' On a similar note, Jambaz scoffs at the stupidity of the U.S. in allowing “even suspected terrorists” to be given lawyers. If this is true, it would be an own goal for the terrorists, at least in the propaganda war – because they could claim, rightly, that America’s failure to try suspects in a just and rigorous manner is hypocritical. I am not suggesting that terrorists should not be depicted as evil, monomaniacal, tragically deluded men. The leader of the 7/7 London Underground bombers and Timothy McVeigh, men whose lives are well-documented, fit that description exactly. But the most engaging, archetypal, and truly haunting literary bad guys tend to have something understandable in their nature, causing readers to fear sympathizing with, or worse, identifying with them. For example, Victor Hugo’s essentially fascist gendarme Javert is a self-made man who was born in a prison; his mercilessness disguises his fear that he was somehow born damned. In THE BUTTER BATTLE BOOK, each gang of arms-racers tragically thinks that their escalation is necessary to prevent their own destruction. That is an intelligible paranoia. Jambaz’s mania isn’t, at least not without a more detailed imagining of his life and background than Bodman offers. More troublingly, CHECKMATE delivers a nasty little message about the dangers of love across national and ethnic boundaries. There’s a betrayal that suggests – I assume unintentionally – that treason happens when white American women don’t stick to their own kind. Bodman’s one-dimensional depiction of all the brown men with the exception of Raj Singh is so hard-handed, the betrayal is detectible long in advance. When it is finally deployed, it is anticlimactic. As a former senior director for the White House National Security Council, Bodman purports to offer an insider’s view of American foreign policy, national security efforts, and geopolitics. Unfortunately, while CHECKMATE is a thrilling thriller, it also affirms the worst suspicions of the critics of the current American administration: that it sees everything, and everybody, in uncomplicated black and white.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, March 2007
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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