Fail-Safe
Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler
Written and set just in the terrifying year of 1962, when the world seemingly teetered on the brink of nuclear destruction at the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, Fail-Safe takes fears of nuclear annihilation and a perilously naïve trust in machinery to their logical conclusion. The prologue itself asserts that the novel's conclusions will most assuredly come to pass, if not in the particular way envisioned herein, and though the novel has become a bit dated because, well, that didn't happen, it is nonetheless strangely powerful and almost claims a sense of immediacy even fifty years after its publication. What holds it back, however, is its inextricable ties to its own time; with a United States president so thinly veiled they really may as well have called him Kennedy consulting with Nikita Khrushchev, the book hardly seems relevant at first glance. It becomes, instead, a brilliant look at the fears of the Cold War era, an interesting, if not perfectly executed, vision of the intricate mechanisms that somehow did not manage to combine and destroy us all. This is not to say, however, that the book is particularly well-written, or even well-plotted; indeed, the fact that it is entertaining, let alone emotionally effective, is shocking given the number of missteps that very nearly doom the book at every step along the way. Burdick and Wheeler begin in a somewhat mixed manner, offering an in-depth character portrait with a ticking clock nicely placed at its end. The instinct to pull back in the next chapter and re-set the stage is marvelous, and the authors almost pull it off before the reader realizes that we are not just seeing the main players but getting additional superfluous backstory that almost, but doesn't quite, work.
The suspense so strongly built and so deftly pulled back in the first few chapters dissolves entirely as the authors allow the plot and characters to stagnate, and the book grows stale, predicated upon the importance of mere minutes and seconds yet seemingly obsessed with decades and years, not to mention those clumsy, "Hey reader!" conversations that explain everything in some unrealistically blunt simplicity. By the time the plot returns to its suspenseful self, readers have to re-acquaint themselves with a strangely ill-defined, yet heavily explored, cast of characters, and the effect is choppy where slick thrills are really called for. Place this all in front of an excruciatingly dated backdrop and sprinkle it with awkward, overt references to the inevitable rise of the machines and you get…an entertaining and oddly moving testament to the raw emotional power of total nuclear destruction. I'm not sure entirely how this happened, but somewhere within the escalating tension the clumsiness made way and the immediacy of the problem subtly infused itself into my consciousness. A visit to the cockpits of the bombing squadron tasked with destroying Moscow (of course it's the largest of Russian cities) and to those of the fighters sent to bring them down helps, and there is a quiet desperation throughout the writing, lurking beneath the surface, a result of the same bravado and assuredness that makes the prologue seem so silly in retrospect. At some point, it becomes obvious that Burdick and Wheeler wrote what they considered to be an inalterable consequence of politics, and despite its punch it never becomes a desperate plea for peace. Instead, Fail-Safe is quietly resigned to its conclusion, foreseeable yet completely devastating, a warning that doesn't quite cast a shadow of lasting relevance but which throws the Cold War crisis into sharp, and somewhat terrifying, relief, even fifty years later.
Grade: A-
Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler
Written and set just in the terrifying year of 1962, when the world seemingly teetered on the brink of nuclear destruction at the hands of the United States and the Soviet Union, Fail-Safe takes fears of nuclear annihilation and a perilously naïve trust in machinery to their logical conclusion. The prologue itself asserts that the novel's conclusions will most assuredly come to pass, if not in the particular way envisioned herein, and though the novel has become a bit dated because, well, that didn't happen, it is nonetheless strangely powerful and almost claims a sense of immediacy even fifty years after its publication. What holds it back, however, is its inextricable ties to its own time; with a United States president so thinly veiled they really may as well have called him Kennedy consulting with Nikita Khrushchev, the book hardly seems relevant at first glance. It becomes, instead, a brilliant look at the fears of the Cold War era, an interesting, if not perfectly executed, vision of the intricate mechanisms that somehow did not manage to combine and destroy us all. This is not to say, however, that the book is particularly well-written, or even well-plotted; indeed, the fact that it is entertaining, let alone emotionally effective, is shocking given the number of missteps that very nearly doom the book at every step along the way. Burdick and Wheeler begin in a somewhat mixed manner, offering an in-depth character portrait with a ticking clock nicely placed at its end. The instinct to pull back in the next chapter and re-set the stage is marvelous, and the authors almost pull it off before the reader realizes that we are not just seeing the main players but getting additional superfluous backstory that almost, but doesn't quite, work.
The suspense so strongly built and so deftly pulled back in the first few chapters dissolves entirely as the authors allow the plot and characters to stagnate, and the book grows stale, predicated upon the importance of mere minutes and seconds yet seemingly obsessed with decades and years, not to mention those clumsy, "Hey reader!" conversations that explain everything in some unrealistically blunt simplicity. By the time the plot returns to its suspenseful self, readers have to re-acquaint themselves with a strangely ill-defined, yet heavily explored, cast of characters, and the effect is choppy where slick thrills are really called for. Place this all in front of an excruciatingly dated backdrop and sprinkle it with awkward, overt references to the inevitable rise of the machines and you get…an entertaining and oddly moving testament to the raw emotional power of total nuclear destruction. I'm not sure entirely how this happened, but somewhere within the escalating tension the clumsiness made way and the immediacy of the problem subtly infused itself into my consciousness. A visit to the cockpits of the bombing squadron tasked with destroying Moscow (of course it's the largest of Russian cities) and to those of the fighters sent to bring them down helps, and there is a quiet desperation throughout the writing, lurking beneath the surface, a result of the same bravado and assuredness that makes the prologue seem so silly in retrospect. At some point, it becomes obvious that Burdick and Wheeler wrote what they considered to be an inalterable consequence of politics, and despite its punch it never becomes a desperate plea for peace. Instead, Fail-Safe is quietly resigned to its conclusion, foreseeable yet completely devastating, a warning that doesn't quite cast a shadow of lasting relevance but which throws the Cold War crisis into sharp, and somewhat terrifying, relief, even fifty years later.
Grade: A-
No comments:
Post a Comment