Calli's Reviews: Gideon's Corpse by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Let me start this by saying that normally I don't review until I've finished a book, but since I'm on chapter 7 and already struggling with the desire to MST3K this thing, I will start here.
The scientist in me is dying a little with every page that I read. The novelist in me is currently hiding under a table.
All right, here's the first seven chapters in a nutshell: Gideon Crew, scientist, action hero, and dude who really desperately wants to go fishing, has received payment for some sort of job from your standard shady guy, and gets an "advance" for diffusing a hostage situation, which he at first refuses, because, as I said, he really wants to go fishing, and shady guy takes his sweet time working around, in horribly stereotypical bad-action-movie witless repartee, to the fact that it actually is a hostage situation, in which a former colleague of Gideon's is holding a family at gunpoint. It is not until he is told that there are two children involved that he (reluctantly) accepts the job.
Okay, first point of contention. This dude has already lost my sympathy. On page three. I'm holding out for an antihero who can make it to chapter three at least before I've dismissed him as opportunistic scum. Especially since later chapters point out that this situation is a major trigger for him, since his father was gunned down in cold blood in front of him in what might have been a hostage situation, but which is not only not explain, but told, not shown.
Fine and good, if the guy actually reacted to the hostage situation when it was revealed to him. In fact, he cavalierly scoffs that the “typical Los Alamos geek,” “wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Then he gets angry at his boss for assuming that he’ll drop everything and go play hero, and then heads off to a namedropped section of residential New York City to do just that, though not before it is offhandly mentioned that Gideon “had eleven months of life left - or at least that’s what they had told him.”
Raise your hand if you’ve heard the “antihero living on borrowed time” character model before. Good, that’s what I thought. I’ve got nothing against it if you manage to actually make me give a fig about the guy dying - so far, all Preston and Child have managed is a critical sympathy failure.
By the way, this review is just about tied with the first chapter so far for length, so at least the pain here doesn’t last long, especially as chapters are usually about two or three, sometimes four, pages. But the big problem with this book, one which is evident in the first few chapters, is that nothing is described. Oh, except for an obligatory camera pan of the “Former Meatpacking district of Manhattan,” which doesn’t manage to engage the mind’s eye, let alone the mind’s ear, nose, sense of touch, or interest in any way whatsoever, and which is reproduced below for your perusal.
“Gideon Crew stood at the window of the conference room, looking out over the former Meatpacking District of Manhattan. His gaze followed the tarred roofs of the old buildings, now hip boutiques and trendy restaurants; moved past the new High Line park thick with people; past the rotting piers; and came to rest on the broad expanse of the Hudson River. In the hazy sun of early summer, the river for a change looked like real water, the surface a mass of blue moving upstream with the incoming tide.”
The adjectives in the first two paragraphs are as follows: tarred, old, hip, trendy, “thick with people,” rotting, broad, hazy, early, real, blue, and incoming. It’s basically a list of objects and places which fails to evoke anything for people who have no idea where the namedropped places are, and the only really descriptive turn of phrase description is the “hazy sun of early summer,” which suggests to me that there’s a pollution problem. The “real water” line could have added to something descriptive or poetic if there were anything here to build on, but it gets completely ironed out with the “mass of blue,” which gives the whole scene a feel of being the literary equivalent of a second grader’s crayon sketch. No, I lie, the narrative structure does that as a whole.
Okay, before I get sidetracked by the fact that this whole thing reads like a mediocre fanfiction of the thriller genera, made mostly of dialogue, extremely flat interior monologue, and snippets of description trying desperately to catch up, let me finish summarizing the plot thus far.
In chapter two, Gideon arrives at the house of the hostage situation, also tritely and stiffly described, including the crowd of observers which are, quite frankly, described as if they are a snapshot of a crowded street in a bad parody of a cop show, is briefed by… somebody official in an easily forgotten capacity, and is sent in with an earpiece. We will for now assume that the lessons in hostage negotiation, which sound somewhat sensible, are accurate enough to pass my muster, as it’s not the sort of thing that wikipedia is a good source on.
Anyhow, minor backstory of hostage taker is given, the hostage taker speaks in emphatic italics, (in order to indicate that he is screaming into a megaphone) about conspiracies, government agents, kidnappings, experiments and “rays.”
Point of contention two: this dude is supposedly a scientist. I would say nuclear physicist if that wasn’t putting words on the book’s pages, because that specific term hasn’t been mentioned yet. “Tell them to turn off the rays,” just sounds kind of off… yeah, he’s supposed to be crazy at this point, showing signs of paranoia and schizophrenia, but this, combined with the fact that the guy’s dialogue is like an actor reading the wrong script at the top of his voice and just keeps repeating, sounds like someone left the TV running on an old sci-fi channel.
Okay, so Gideon tries to talk the guy down, resulting in a lot of repetition and volunteering, with practically no emotion, to take the place of the children in the family as the dude’s hostage, in what is supposed to be a brave maneuver, hostage guy goes off his rocker, starts shooting, misses Gideon (and presumably the whole milling crowd - at least, if the bullet doesn’t disappear once it passes him, we never hear about it), threatens the little boy in the situation, yells about his head hurting, his skin on fire, and pain in his stomach, is tackled by the kid’s father, tackled by the kid, blows the fathers head off, and is tackled by our action hero, and turned into a ballistics dummy by the swat team at what is obviously a horribly unsafe point-blank range.
“Hot and bloody matter” is obligatorily sprayed everywhere, and the action hero pukes.
Okay, points for the disgusting nature of this scene being recognized by the protagonist. The pacing stopped being quite so stilted there for a bit, but overall, the whole of chapters three and four was not exactly suspenseful or evocative.
… Okay, fast-forward to cleanup, during which it is discovered that this dude was radioactive. Enough to make a Geiger counter go ballistic. Cue mass panic from the entire tactical squad. This guy better have swallowed plutonium or something.
This is where I start buying flowers to lay at the grave of science.
Time for my friend Wikipedia, and my two semesters of chemistry to explain this to anyone who didn’t catch it: this dude is supposedly emitting gamma rays, which are caused by radioactive decay. As in, according to the book, this dudes atoms are emitting gamma rays, meaning that they were unstable and are breaking down.
Take the floor, Wikipedia:
Gamma rays from radioactive gamma decay are produced alongside other forms of radiation such as alpha or beta, and are produced after the other types of decay occur. The mechanism is that when a nucleus emits an α or β particle, the daughter nucleus is usually left in an excited state. It can then move to a lower energy state by emitting a gamma ray, in much the same way that an atomic electron can jump to a lower energy state by emitting infrared, visible, or ultraviolet light.
Chem 102 for dummies version: gamma decay is what happens to extra energy in an atom after an already unstable atom spits out an alpha particle (two protons, two neutrons) or beta particle (an electron or a positron). A person who has been irradiated with gamma rays can suffer radiation sickness and cancer because the Gamma Ray is no friend to DNA. The Gamma Ray is used for sterilizing medical equipment because it kills germs dead.
It does not cause structural changes to stable atoms. Bombard a brick with Gamma rays and I can guarantee you that you will still have a brick - one that is not now emitting radiation. This is why we aren’t all dead: concrete is generally sufficient to contain small sources of gamma radiation, and does not become radioactive by being exposed to it.
Notify the world, because this bears repeating:
HAVING BEEN IRRADIATED DOES NOT MEAN THAT A PERSON IS NOW RADIOACTIVE. RADIATION SICKNESS IS NOT CONTAGIOUS, ESPECIALLY NOT BY EXPOSURE TO BIOLOGICAL MATERIALS SUCH AS BLOOD AND GUTS. THE ONLY EXPOSURE VECTOR OF IRRADIATION IS PROXIMITY TO RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL.
BLOOD IS NOT A GODSDAMMED VECTOR!
Ahem. Right.
So moments after exposure, the quarantine is put into place and random people on the street who set off the Geiger counter - after half an hour of exposure at the distance of tens of yards, through the walls - are all herded into vans and shipped off into isolation.
That is not how you use a Geiger counter. They actually measure the ionization of whatever gas they’re filled with in the presence of radioactivity. They are, and repeat after me, not a way to determine who has been most exposed to radiation, because people exposed to radiation are not, in fact, sources of radiation.
Also, as these people are not contagious, quarantine is entirely gratuitous. If the hostage taker was a source of radiation or if a source had been in the house, everyone who lives on the block would have been exposed, probably over the process of several weeks or so, in their sleep, and the spectators would have the minimum of exposure. What they should have done in that case was evacuate the area to minimize exposure and open up some free clinics to treat any complications that arose. Instead, the ‘experts’ nearly cause a panic trying to keep the public in the radius of exposure, and call in more people to be exposed, who then ship off random citizens in scary vans in some sort of conspiracy-theory-esque manner.
It’s enough to make you think that the paranoid man was right and that the authorities are trying to kill them all.
Inside the van, our action hero “scientist” gets in a fight with panicking macho-man, who claims that everyone in the van is dead because of the radiation, and is gratuitously picked up out of his seat and held up by his shirtfront.
On a bus. Do you remember the last time that a bus was tall enough for this sort of testosterone-fueled posing? I do, but that’s because it was in the sixth grade when hardly anyone topped five feet, let alone was a big, beefy SWAT team guy. He is calmly decked by the debriefing official, who is a sudden friend of the hero’s, and this is OK with all involved. On a bus, mind you. A supposedly moving bus.
At least they’re getting out of the immediate area of radiation exposure.
Oh, yeah, our supposed “expert” hero convinces people with blood on their clothing to strip. Which is far more people than should be expected, given that you’d have had to be A) Gideon or B) the people shooting the psycho to get caught in the blood spatter. And the little boy is completely unexposed, despite the fact that he and his dad were both supposedly kicking the shit out of the guy who had taken them hostage when the gun went off and Gideon channeled his inner defensive tackle. Meaning, that when the SWAT team went for overkill, they should have had to move the child and the corpse, but they only had to peel Gideon away before firing a multitude of guns at quarters unsafe for everyone involved.
Not to mention that even if the blood was radioactive, stripping wouldn’t help, because the blood would still be in the bus with them, releasing some sort of atomic particle and waves of gamma radiation.
Did these authors sleep through high school chemistry?
Okay, while in the bus, Gideon’s inner dialogue utters the line that I have immortalized above, and I have to agree with him. The ignorance of these people about radiation is not only appalling, but enough to make me laugh until I puke.
Assorted other atrocities that stand out in these last chapters:
1) “The wife is going to make it - just a flesh wound.” This woman has been shot. (Despite the fact that the villain is supposedly ignorant of the basics of guns, including the part where you point the open end at your target. Okay, sure, he’s supposedly off his rocker, but he manages to shoot the woman while inside the house, and the woman’s screaming is cut off. Only plausible explanation - she fainted at the sight of her blood. Otherwise, even if the bullet just grazed her arm - which should be cause for sending her to a hospital anyway - she’s going to be screaming.)
2) The aforementioned fusillade of overkill. It’s like a bad zombie movie, and far too close to every innocent party for my comfort. And if they weren’t concerned about civilian safety, why the hell didn’t they snipe the guy way back when? And what moron called that shot - the dude is now disarmed, you can armwrestle him into cuffs now. In a real SWAT team, there would be a public outcry and all these people would be mopping floors for the rest of their careers.
3) Nobody is doing shit for the little boy who just saw his father’s head get blown off right in front of his eyes. I’m not an expert in child psychology, but he’s going to need therapy, so get him back to his mother and sister and the hell away from the gory corpses, especially because he could very easily go into shock and everyone in a hostage situation should be given medical and psychological attention. Instead, the focus is very narrowly attached to the protagonist, who is told “not to sweat it,” after his actions resulted in the death of two people and who has just finished puking his guts out at the carnage.
4) “He slammed the scientist to the ground, seized his forearm, and broke it against the banister like a stick of firewood.”
This is a banister. Does anyone see what is wrong with this picture?
On the scale of what breaks what, I can reliably inform you that bone, muscle and sinew wins over a bit of decorative woodwork. If you want to gratuitously shatter the radius and ulna, may I suggest the (probably concrete) steps that are apparently near enough at hand that you can slam the villain into them?
Where did the stairs come from, anyway? (They weren’t mentioned previously.) Or is it a porch? And how come it hasn’t been in anyone’s way until now? The world may never know. Can I have my tootsie pop now?
5) “Chalker wasn’t crazy.” The protagonist walks a fine semantic line by saying that yes, the villain was irradiated, and therefore not crazy, (he’d been claiming that he was being irradiated) and he then claims that “A massive dose of gamma radiation scrambles the mind.” Am I the only one who sees the contradiction here? Either the guy is “crazy” and all his claims are false, or he’s telling the truth, but still engaging in irrational behavior prompted by irradiation. (Or he’s on LSD. I prefer that explanation to the “gamma radiation makes you crazy,” because it kills your cells, instead of interfering with your thoughts. Dear Preston and Child, why didn’t I go crazy that one time they had to give me an X-ray? How come no one wakes up paranoid and homicidal in an MRI? You fail neuroscience forever.)
6) This exchange between the official who is a secondary character and Gideon:
“You mentioned something about Chalker finding religion.” He paused. “May I ask… which religion?”
“Um, Islam.”
I’m a Christian and I’m offended by that. Good god people, get it through your head that not all Muslims are terrorists and not all terrorists are Muslim. And if this was supposedly such a factor in this situation, shouldn’t there be someone back at the SWAT base running an exhaustive internet search on this guy? ESPECIALLY if they managed to find an old colleague and either contact his shady employer in the hopes that he, and only he, could talk some sense into this dude. How did they manage not to overlook this? It’s a hostage situation, if you’re attempting to bargain with someone and have the time to fetch someone they respect, why wouldn’t you get a psych profile? You people not only make no sense, you don’t watch or read enough of your own genera to gather information about procedures that way.
The fact that the dude is radioactive, taking hostages, and converted to Islam is then instantly extrapolated to “some Jihadist organization must have a nuclear core,” despite the fact that the suspect’s job is the primary suspect for exposing him to this kind of radiation. (He supposedly “designs nuclear bombs” as if they’re some sort of Armageddon fashion statement. Nuclear disarmament, America? I think not.) Oh, and that he’s an expert and should know better than to muck around with this shit, especially in a matter that would irradiate his supposed co-conspirators, and that safety would have been paramount in his mind after the two lab accidents that his workplace supposedly just had. Which could also be the point at which he was irradiated.
Keep in mind, that the core of a nuclear reactor is not the same thing as a ‘nuke’ or any other sort of bomb, and that with this dude dead - hey, how many people qualified to convert the enriched plutonium or uranium from this fuel rod can there be in your average jihadist organization? Too bad you gratuitously murdered this guy and can’t read him his Miranda rights, much less question him.
Oh, and since this radiation is being treated as contagious, you don’t even need to build the nuke, just irradiate yourselves and run around New York City spreading the paranoid zombie apocalypse.
Bad enough that no one even wikipedia’d this stuff, now the treatment of the major plot premise is being turned into situational swiss cheese within the space of three chapters. If you’re going to make an acceptable break with reality, stick to it like glue. Also, if you have a scientist for a main character, have at least a high school understanding of the subject in which they are a supposed ‘expert,’ especially when you are writing for an audience who should at least know that much. I’m not sure if the fact that this was a widely-praised “New York Times Best Seller” says more about the failure of American public education, or the fact that all you have to do to be a New York Times best seller is make your last names bigger than the title on the cover and get the thing to be sold in all fifty states.
Bottom line: if all it takes to unravel the whole premise of your plot is a college student with access to Wikipedia, then you have not properly done your research.
And here, dear readers, I close the book, disgusted.
Disclaimer: As per always starting now, "quoted material," unless specified otherwise, comes directly from the novel being reviewed without any changes whatsoever. My reviews are for the purposes of entertainment and possibly education, and the only thing that I could even be remotely described as affiliated with is my college, because I bought the t-shirt. Do not sue me, for I am flat broke and excercizing my right to free speech.
Thank you to Wikipeda editors and chemistry teachers everywhere.