Book Number 22 of 2024.
Ken Follett’s Never is a very plausible thriller about the possibility of nuclear war breaking out in the near future. It’s divided into five sections, each one corresponding to a DEFCON level.
The first section – DEFCON Level 1, Lowest State of Readiness – is the longest, taking nearly half of the novel’s length. It opens with a low-level CIA operative, Tamara Levit, who is stationed in Chad. She meets an undercover agent, Abdul John Haddad, a Lebanese-American who is on the trail of a notorious Islamist leader, al-Farabi. He gives her some useful info that leads to a joint US/French/Chad attack on a jihadi base.
Kiah is a Chadian widow with a two-year-old son, Naji, who lives by a shrinking lake in the middle of the desert. She knows there is no future for her there, so she finds a migrant smuggler who will get her to Tripoli, Libya. Her dream is to eventually make it to France where she can find work. Abdul ends up joining her group of migrants, because, unbeknownst to them, their bus has a large shipment of cocaine that al-Farabi intends to use to fund his terrorism.
Tab Sadoul is from France and an attache at the European Union mission in N’Djamena, the capitol of Chad. He and Tamara quickly develop a very serious relationship, even though they are both working for different countries’ intelligence services.
Pauline Green is the President of the United States. She is a moderately conservative Republican who is able to see the big picture when small hot spots develop around the world.
Chang Kai is the Chinese vice minister for international intelligence. He is married to Tao Ting, one of the most popular television actresses in China. He is young, ambitious, and realistic about what China needs to do to thrive in the future.
All of these disparate characters and their narratives will somehow converge and end up involved in a potential world-ending crisis.
This is the first novel I’ve read by Follett, and I enjoyed it very much. All of his characters are human – flawed, but trying to live their lives to the best of their ability. Even President Green, in the midst of the most demanding and important job of the world, has to deal with her fourteen-year-old daughter’s bad behavior at school.
Follett also does a great job of portraying the petty politics and power plays that occur in every bureacracy, whether it’s the CIA station in Chad, the Chinese ministries in Beijing, or the White House in Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, true heroes like Abdul Haddad put their lives on the line to get valuable information about terrorists.
Follett also is very good about providing the perspectives of characters who are not Western. For example, Chang Kai finds amusing US complaints about China’s theft of intellectual property, because in his mind, the West exploited China for hundreds of years. Their disregard of our copyright laws is justified, because we disregarded their rights (in his opinion).
As the DEFCONs inexorably ratchet up, the various subplots come to happy conclusions, but over everything is the spector of nuclear war. North Korea is the tripwire, as Chang Kai in China and President Green desperately try to keep the situation under control. Follett has done his homework – every step of the journey is believable and filled with interesting details. What exactly is the process involved when the US president wants to order a nuclear strike? How accurate are ICBMS, and how effective are missile defenses? How do different factions in China compete for power? Follett does a great job conveying all of these small but important facts.
Never is a hefty 800 pages long, but it is a relatively quick read. Once I hit DEFCON 2: One step from nuclear war. Armed Forces ready to engage in less than six hours, I had to finish the book in one sitting! I also appreciate the fact that for Follett, no particular ideology is at fault in the crisis, but rather short-sightedness and cultural insecurity. Neither President Green nor President Chen of China are warmongers, but they get swept up in events. Follett reserves his contempt and disgust for the radical Islamists operating in northern Africa. They are truly evil persons who have no respect for innocent life.
I highly recommend Never if you’re looking for a thought-provoking thriller. Published in 2021, it is highly applicable to today’s global situation, as mid-level conflicts are threatening to expand into wider ones. I pray what Follett describes never happens.
FracTad's Bookshelf 