Deaver Watch: Garden of Beasts
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This 2006 novel won Jeffery Deaver the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Prize and brought him to the attention of the Ian Fleming Estate for authorship of an upcoming Bond novel. It's maybe the best starting point to mug up for Carte Blanche, though it's 500 pages long.
Garden of Beasts is set mostly in Berlin 1936 at the time of the Olympic Games. It's about an American hitman (or 'button man') Paul Schumann who is of German origin and is bribed/coerced into performing an assassination of a Nazi bigwig who is suspected of being behind German rearmament by a US senator and other powers that be. He has his contact in Berlin but other than that he's pretty much on his own. A bit like Bond in Carte Blanche who can have the rug cut under him should his mission go awry, with no knowledge of his existence admitted.
GoB is not the page turner that Deaver's earlier works is, but it is more considered. Deaver works his research in fairly well, for instance we learn that the term Nazi is seen as derivative, a name for cretin in some parts of Germany, they're actually known as National Socialists. It's a good time to set the book as the Gestapo is tightening its grip on the nation but doesn't quite have it in a strangehold. Deaver is good at talking about 'blindness' - the public's inability to relate or see anything to the authorities that might count against them in any way, making you see how the even worse Nazi atrocities could have been carried out. He's good at showing how the country has been hijacked by a bunch of thugs and brainwashers, if a bit heavyhanded. Parts of the book read like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Deaver is excellent at setting up the end of each chapter with a cliffhanger so you want to read on. Another point of praise is the scrambled sympathies he evokes. For the general, who is mainly known as Ernst throughout the book, is a sympathetic figure who feels Hitler is a madman. So is it really a good idea for him to be wiped out, you wonder? Soon on Schumann's trail is Willie Kohl, a middle-aged Cripo investigator and family man who begrudges the way the Gestapo have usurped his powers - again, a sympathetic individual for the most part. So it's not a case of whether Schumann will carry out his attack but should he?
I'm not sure why the Nazi general is called Ernst, while Kohl is Kohl and Schaumann is back to his first name, Paul. Would Deaver have Blofeld as Ernst, Bond as James but Felix Leiter as Leiter?
Like I say, it has cliffhangers but this can work against the book. Too many of them make the book feel contrived, like an author's party trick. There are a few twists and you get the feeling Deaver has them all set up beforehand and is trying to get from A to B rather artlessly. You feel a bit cheated, unlike with Roald Dahl's twists where you feel complicit and a delicious victim of a tease. That may be the reason Deaver doesn't really emotionally engage, because you can't do that if you're trying to trick the audience or reader. You go away feeling, yeah, I could have seen that if I'd paid attention.
Some stuff is ludicrous. Only when he's out there does Schumann realise he has to make the shooting in public, which requires a rifle rather than his usual close-up work. D'oh! Shouldn't they have discussed that sooner? When he gets into trouble and is chased by Stormtroopers he just happens to bump into a guy who can help him out and provide useful cover. Right from the off he's making mistakes, which does admittedly advance the plot.
Because Deaver's writing has flaws, you wonder if he's omitting information to hoodwink you, or when you see a 'mistake' that actually is a clue to a twist you ought to pick up on, the reason you don't suspect is partly because you just think, oh, Deaver's messed up.
Having real-life soon to be Olympics hero Jesse Owens turn up and help Schumann is daft and implausible. Then again, cameos by Hitler are very well done and all too plausible, same goes for Goring, so credit there.
It's odd that the hitman is the least interesting or well developed character in the book really but I suppose it makes us less able to see what he might do in a given situation.
The Berlin you see is all Cabaret Tomorow Belongs to Me type stuff. It's all anti-Nazi propoganda, okay I know they're bad guys, but it seems we're being spoonfed all the time. It would be more interesting if just somebody had something good to say about them. I mean, this is 1936, it's early days you know. It's like Deaver has a text book of Terrible Things the Nazis Did and is just inserting them into the text. The characters mouth the things they ought to, what you expect them to say.
Worse, it seems to happen all within just two or three days but it feels like a week. There's no sense that all this could occur in such a short space of time. It's just not plausible. No reference to our man getting footsore or the time of the day, or what he has to do later on. I suppose the Bond films do the same but at least you see Bond bed a woman and so get the sense of evening becoming night and then day again, marking the passage of time.
Too many twists towards the end leave one feeling a bit nonplussed and it's all wrapped up very tidily, too tidily to be honest. Really this is meant to be Frederick Forsythe territory but no question he does it better in The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File.
So, for Carte Blanche expect:
Multiple plot lines, like FRWL, cut aways to the big villain's plans
Lots of action or events implausibly packed into 2-3 days
Cliffhangers at the end of a chapter
No real sensous descriptive evocative writing
2 or 3 amazing twists
Few sex scenes and they'll be a bit rubbish too
Garden of Beasts is set mostly in Berlin 1936 at the time of the Olympic Games. It's about an American hitman (or 'button man') Paul Schumann who is of German origin and is bribed/coerced into performing an assassination of a Nazi bigwig who is suspected of being behind German rearmament by a US senator and other powers that be. He has his contact in Berlin but other than that he's pretty much on his own. A bit like Bond in Carte Blanche who can have the rug cut under him should his mission go awry, with no knowledge of his existence admitted.
GoB is not the page turner that Deaver's earlier works is, but it is more considered. Deaver works his research in fairly well, for instance we learn that the term Nazi is seen as derivative, a name for cretin in some parts of Germany, they're actually known as National Socialists. It's a good time to set the book as the Gestapo is tightening its grip on the nation but doesn't quite have it in a strangehold. Deaver is good at talking about 'blindness' - the public's inability to relate or see anything to the authorities that might count against them in any way, making you see how the even worse Nazi atrocities could have been carried out. He's good at showing how the country has been hijacked by a bunch of thugs and brainwashers, if a bit heavyhanded. Parts of the book read like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Deaver is excellent at setting up the end of each chapter with a cliffhanger so you want to read on. Another point of praise is the scrambled sympathies he evokes. For the general, who is mainly known as Ernst throughout the book, is a sympathetic figure who feels Hitler is a madman. So is it really a good idea for him to be wiped out, you wonder? Soon on Schumann's trail is Willie Kohl, a middle-aged Cripo investigator and family man who begrudges the way the Gestapo have usurped his powers - again, a sympathetic individual for the most part. So it's not a case of whether Schumann will carry out his attack but should he?
I'm not sure why the Nazi general is called Ernst, while Kohl is Kohl and Schaumann is back to his first name, Paul. Would Deaver have Blofeld as Ernst, Bond as James but Felix Leiter as Leiter?
Like I say, it has cliffhangers but this can work against the book. Too many of them make the book feel contrived, like an author's party trick. There are a few twists and you get the feeling Deaver has them all set up beforehand and is trying to get from A to B rather artlessly. You feel a bit cheated, unlike with Roald Dahl's twists where you feel complicit and a delicious victim of a tease. That may be the reason Deaver doesn't really emotionally engage, because you can't do that if you're trying to trick the audience or reader. You go away feeling, yeah, I could have seen that if I'd paid attention.
Some stuff is ludicrous. Only when he's out there does Schumann realise he has to make the shooting in public, which requires a rifle rather than his usual close-up work. D'oh! Shouldn't they have discussed that sooner? When he gets into trouble and is chased by Stormtroopers he just happens to bump into a guy who can help him out and provide useful cover. Right from the off he's making mistakes, which does admittedly advance the plot.
Because Deaver's writing has flaws, you wonder if he's omitting information to hoodwink you, or when you see a 'mistake' that actually is a clue to a twist you ought to pick up on, the reason you don't suspect is partly because you just think, oh, Deaver's messed up.
Having real-life soon to be Olympics hero Jesse Owens turn up and help Schumann is daft and implausible. Then again, cameos by Hitler are very well done and all too plausible, same goes for Goring, so credit there.
It's odd that the hitman is the least interesting or well developed character in the book really but I suppose it makes us less able to see what he might do in a given situation.
The Berlin you see is all Cabaret Tomorow Belongs to Me type stuff. It's all anti-Nazi propoganda, okay I know they're bad guys, but it seems we're being spoonfed all the time. It would be more interesting if just somebody had something good to say about them. I mean, this is 1936, it's early days you know. It's like Deaver has a text book of Terrible Things the Nazis Did and is just inserting them into the text. The characters mouth the things they ought to, what you expect them to say.
Worse, it seems to happen all within just two or three days but it feels like a week. There's no sense that all this could occur in such a short space of time. It's just not plausible. No reference to our man getting footsore or the time of the day, or what he has to do later on. I suppose the Bond films do the same but at least you see Bond bed a woman and so get the sense of evening becoming night and then day again, marking the passage of time.
Too many twists towards the end leave one feeling a bit nonplussed and it's all wrapped up very tidily, too tidily to be honest. Really this is meant to be Frederick Forsythe territory but no question he does it better in The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File.
So, for Carte Blanche expect:
Multiple plot lines, like FRWL, cut aways to the big villain's plans
Lots of action or events implausibly packed into 2-3 days
Cliffhangers at the end of a chapter
No real sensous descriptive evocative writing
2 or 3 amazing twists
Few sex scenes and they'll be a bit rubbish too
"This is where we leave you Mr Bond."
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Roger Moore 1927-2017
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