Terminator-like hero in an implausible plot
An unintended consequence of the 9/11 strikes was to give thriller writers the world over a ready-made, irrefutable plot skeleton. That in place, imagination can stretch in all directions, bend over backwards, or even do a splendid shirshasana — all of which David Baldacci does with his latest book, Zero Day. That’s not all. Baldacci gives us a hero, Special Agent John Puller, who could put the Terminator to shame with his machine precision, unflinching focus and super-human intelligence.
The story is complicated. It starts simply though, with a mailman in a godforsaken coal mining town, Drake, in West Virginia, discovering a family of four slaughtered in their living room. From here, the plot bloats to an incredible radius, extending to the Pentagon and enemies of the country.
The dead man turns out to be a colonel with the top-secret Defence Intelligence Agency. And the execution-style murders ensure that the Taliban can’t be far behind. This leaves the big bosses in the military worried, and they order a clandestine investigation.
Enter Agent Puller. At his best moments, Puller, Terminator like, is an emotionless, efficient killing machine that resembles a human being. Scenes with him as a human are bad, or sad, or both. A war hero who did his country proud in Afghanistan, he has won more medals and ribbons than fingers and toes put together.
To explain his inhumanness, Baldacci has given Puller a father — a living, breathing army legend, a three-star general who is now hidden from the world in a hospital bed, insane and exasperating; a brother — brilliant nuclear scientist, now languishing in the military prison for treason; and no mother. Obviously, Puller turned Terminator. He is now the army’s one-man investigation team, ready to take on anything, even if it is a conspiracy that could annihilate the US. Local police inspector Samantha ‘Sam’ Cole plays the sidekick — beautiful, troubled and single.
The town where the story is set is the most interesting aspect of the book. It exists on a colliery, where the coal is extracted by blowing up the mountains above the mines. Baldacci describes the disastrous effects of surface-mining on the people and environment.
Everything is polluted in Drake, well past point of no return — “coal dust in eggs and depleted uranium in morning coffee”. Making a strong anti-mining pitch, Baldacci brings up the issue repeatedly through the book. At the end of it, this is all the reader really takes home.
The author exaggerates the conspiracy to Hindi-film-climax proportions, where the bad guys surround the hero, and then cool their guns while explaining the whole scheme to him. And that’s more than enough time for Puller to record the confessions, and proceed to kill, maim and capture the villains.
“The beauty of movies is that they don’t have to be logical,” James Cameron once said in defence of his Terminator. “They just have to have plausibility. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.” The same could have been true for Zero Day, but Baldacci forgot to add the key ingredient: plausibility.
An unintended consequence of the 9/11 strikes was to give thriller writers the world over a ready-made, irrefutable plot skeleton. That in place, imagination can stretch in all directions, bend over backwards, or even do a splendid shirshasana — all of which David Baldacci does with his latest book, Zero Day. That’s not all. Baldacci gives us a hero, Special Agent John Puller, who could put the Terminator to shame with his machine precision, unflinching focus and super-human intelligence.
The story is complicated. It starts simply though, with a mailman in a godforsaken coal mining town, Drake, in West Virginia, discovering a family of four slaughtered in their living room. From here, the plot bloats to an incredible radius, extending to the Pentagon and enemies of the country.
The dead man turns out to be a colonel with the top-secret Defence Intelligence Agency. And the execution-style murders ensure that the Taliban can’t be far behind. This leaves the big bosses in the military worried, and they order a clandestine investigation.
Enter Agent Puller. At his best moments, Puller, Terminator like, is an emotionless, efficient killing machine that resembles a human being. Scenes with him as a human are bad, or sad, or both. A war hero who did his country proud in Afghanistan, he has won more medals and ribbons than fingers and toes put together.
To explain his inhumanness, Baldacci has given Puller a father — a living, breathing army legend, a three-star general who is now hidden from the world in a hospital bed, insane and exasperating; a brother — brilliant nuclear scientist, now languishing in the military prison for treason; and no mother. Obviously, Puller turned Terminator. He is now the army’s one-man investigation team, ready to take on anything, even if it is a conspiracy that could annihilate the US. Local police inspector Samantha ‘Sam’ Cole plays the sidekick — beautiful, troubled and single.
The town where the story is set is the most interesting aspect of the book. It exists on a colliery, where the coal is extracted by blowing up the mountains above the mines. Baldacci describes the disastrous effects of surface-mining on the people and environment.
Everything is polluted in Drake, well past point of no return — “coal dust in eggs and depleted uranium in morning coffee”. Making a strong anti-mining pitch, Baldacci brings up the issue repeatedly through the book. At the end of it, this is all the reader really takes home.
The author exaggerates the conspiracy to Hindi-film-climax proportions, where the bad guys surround the hero, and then cool their guns while explaining the whole scheme to him. And that’s more than enough time for Puller to record the confessions, and proceed to kill, maim and capture the villains.
“The beauty of movies is that they don’t have to be logical,” James Cameron once said in defence of his Terminator. “They just have to have plausibility. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.” The same could have been true for Zero Day, but Baldacci forgot to add the key ingredient: plausibility.
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