Exile by Richard North Patterson

Exile

This book is  Geenbelt 2011’s ‘Big Read’ – having finally dragged myself to end of it I am not only disappointed with the book but irritated with Greenbelt from encouraging me to read such drivel.

WARNING: the following does contain spoilers.

If you wanted a book to pass the time while lying on the beach this would be a reasonably acceptable offering but the idea, proffered by Greenbelt, that this was a work that would prompt and merit intelligent people discussing it is fanciful.

The book takes the conflict between Israeli and Palestinians, with the extensions of USA and Iran on either side, as the context for the drama, yet in this massive geopolitical scope it merely flounders.  The author feels the need to tell us a large amount of the ‘history’ of the conflict and so the hapless lawyer in the midst of the story elicits clunky monologues from various parties during his ‘investigations’.  This is one of the causes for the 699 page book being so flabbily written. I also think a strong editorial hand might have cut it by a third and perhaps polished it in something resembling a decent product.   

The book is one that should be filled with intense emotions – yet it is rather flat, we are too often told not shown what is being felt – for example on the trip to the Israel and the West Bank we are repeatedly told that it felt ‘like a different world’ without a vivid description of what this different world consisted of.

There was a major twist in the plot, which when it is finally revealed is a great relief to the reader as the frustration that everyone in the saga was so dim witted they were unaware of this twist was intolerable.  The lawyer and his lover had parted 13 years ago, and now she is back with a 12 year old daughter, the maths was hardly difficult.  This was also the ‘key’ to unlock what the author thought was the intractable puzzle of the rest of the plot.  So shocking was this twist believed to be that it revelation is spun out over 100 pages so we could keep up.

There are also points in which the plotting is weak – and the plot is all this book has going for it – there is the drama of the family and the global conspiracy, the two have become entangled in a symbiotic relationship but how did the threads first come to be twisted, perhaps the really interesting point in the story where a man manages to turn a plot to kill a Prime Minister into revenge against his unfaithful wife – this is never revealed.  

To be frank this book comes close to the category of the crass, as it invokes the Holocaust but it has nothing to say – there are some topics that if spoken of demand the best of speech and thought – not the poor or mediocre disposable ‘literature’ that Patterson gives us.