#anyway if i made a sideblog where i read books chapter by chapter and analyze them would anyone follow it

[rustchild]

can't do this but am home sick so! many, many rattling thoughts about prophet by MacDonald and Blanche under the cut

the way that tension builds and releases in this book is so weird. So weird! it only makes sense when you realize that the authors are taking their cues from Man From U.N.C.L.E fanfiction, so poorly thought out spy infiltration used as an excuse to cause interpersonal drama is the default setting. The main characters sneak into a weapons contractor lab, seemingly behind the backs of the DIA (?) but do it using their real names and are immediately just... given a tour and then welcomed aboard the project. It would have been so easy to make fear of discovery a driving plot point, it would in fact be a staple of spy thrillers, but it just... isn't. it doesn't matter!

there is a scene where the main characters are starting this whole infiltration project in the middle of a fight, and one of them makes so many cutting statements about the other, in front of the scientists that they're investigating, that he drives his love interest to attempted suicide by mystical sci fi serum ???? no one in the laboratory thinks this is weird and there are no major consequences. he's out here saying shit like "if you died no one would miss you" and the two scientists are just like. mhm yep would you like to see the next incredibly unethical testing room sir

it's a sci fi spy thriller mystery in which one of the protagonists can instantly know if almost anything is true or not. so the only way to maintain the mystery is to keep him from asking questions like "is this weapons manufacturer that i am helping going to use the mysterious serum to do war crimes," or "does this mysterious sci fi serum come from a different dimension," or "is the unethical sociopathic evil scientist planning to do bad things to me," all of which feel like pretty basic and obvious questions for him to ask! especially as it becomes progressively more obvious that the weapons manufacturer they're working with is actively fascist.

which brings me to my biggest critique, and the one that actually drove me to finish the audiobook because i desperately wanted to see if they acknowledged it: the politics of this story make no sense. one of the central characters' Entire Deal is that he was so traumatized by being made complicit in CIA war crimes that he developed a heroin addiction and then tried to kill himself. The other main character is a DIA agent, and his girlboss best friend directs air force strikes. The fact that they are almost certainly also party to war crimes is never addressed. Both characters decide to help a US weapons manufacturer decide to do highly unethical experiments on people without asking if the highly unethical program will result in highly unethical methods.

Which is to say: the CIA war crimes backstory is treated as a traumatic event that happened to one of the main characters, and not a genuine, substantial critique of US imperialism. The CIA acted immorally, but the other soldiers can be cool and badass and the actual nature of the war is... only kind of questioned. There are pretty obvious references to post-9/11 american xenophobia, but the shoe never drops on the military as a whole.

Which speaks, I think, to the fanfiction author's desire to have their cake and eat it too. This story treats the war in Afghanistan the same way that the Man From UNCLE fandom treats the cold war: it's bad, america did bad things, but we can't genuinely step outside of the spy thriller genre enough to break down all the ways in which it was bad. To do so would be to implicate our favorite characters and make them bad people, which we can't do, because fanfiction is generally meant to soothe rather than challenge.

There's a scene in which Rao (war crimes truth teller) comes back to their shared hotel room and discovers that Adam (DIA agent) has tied someone to a chair and is preparing to torture them with a hammer. This is framed as a bad thing. However, the focus is on the fact that Adam is ashamed or concerned that Rao witnessed it, presumably because of how it relates to Rao's trauma. Not on the fact that Adam is, y'know, a DIA agent who has tortured people before. The question of who he has tortured, and why, and what exactly he has enabled or participated in is never answered. It isn't even really brought up.

The point that the book is trying to make is, rather heavyhandedly, that nostalgia is weaponized by xenophobes and ethnonationalists in order to get ordinary people on board with fascism. So far, so good. But neither of the main characters have an active connection to this theme as a driving tension. Rao makes references to his experience as a desi person living in London, but there's absolutely no mention of, say, English idealization of the British empire, or Hindu nationalism and associated anti-muslim hostility. Adam, an ashkenazi jew, is separated implicitly from the kind of 50s white americana populism that the book does focus on, but makes next to no mention of antisemitism. Nostalgia as a response to trauma is also HUGE in the jewish diaspora, particularly irt zionism and the imagery of the shtetl--but there's no mention of any of that, either.

so the central theme is one that's confronted only through encounters with cartoonishly on the nose americana fetishists, but never touches the characters development. And this is a problem because, in true fanfic style, the main characters and their relationship are the only things providing driving tension to the first two thirds of the book.

back to the tension/release problem: the first half is interspersed with flashbacks to the life of a mysterious sad kid being raised by a stern, imposing father. you figure out very quickly that this is Adam, because he's jewish and being taught not to express any feelings and it's all very tragic. The problem is that this pivots the tension between Adam and Rao away from 'what's Adam's deal' and towards 'when will Rao figure out what Adam's deal is,' which has far lower stakes.

Which only makes sense as a storytelling structure if you assume that the audience already knows the characters. Y'know. the way they do in fanfiction.

These flashbacks COULD have been used as an avenue to explore antisemitism and american identity among middle class jews in america. They could have been used to look at the ways in which a jewish military family might respond to assimilationist pressures by overcompensating through nationalism. They could have done a lot of things, but they don't, and as a result, they have basically no impact whatsoever.

Other than a H/C moment

Which is a beat lifted so directly from MUNCLE fanfic that i literally said aha! when i heard it

This is a side note, but I couldn't tell what kind of jew adam was, and it drove me insane. His family are observant enough that they have weekly shabbat dinners, but no one is ever described as wearing a kippah. Nowhere in Adam's childhood flashback sequence is a bar mitzvah mentioned, but he cares enough about religion to attend secret, illegal services when he's stationed in Saudi Arabia. Does he keep kosher? Does he believe in G-d? Do his parents expect him to marry a nice jewish girl?

Also, the shabbat dinners are explicitly Jewish (prayers are referenced, candles are lit) but aren't actually called Shabbat dinners. They're friday dinners. Was the goal to try to obscure the kid's identity by making it less obvious that he's jewish? if so, it doesn't work. I'm baffled.

What was Adam doing in Saudi Arabia? Don't worry about it.

This is all of the text that i can fit in this post but i'm still thinking about this book and will be until i die. I didn't realize how much unnecessary physicality there was in fanfic until i heard a published audiobook read out characters drinking things, raising their eyebrows and opening doors over and over again. where were the editors and why did no one catch this. i want to study it under a microscope. i want to do a close reading and then make ever single fanfic writer read that close reading so they can understand the weird shit that this subculture produces. i want to call the authors and have an honest, frank, loving conversation in which i ask them if they've ever met a jew

i wish that old school blogs where people write little book reviews were still a thing. i just finished an audiobook that wasn't good, but it was not good in a way that was so baffling that i desperately need somewhere to pick it apart with a stick. and i do not have the brain power to write a whole fancy article about it