Executive chaos

Google for the word ‘perseverance’ and chances are you are likely to come up with one and only one result and that result would probably have my name all over it! Not Ghajini Mohammed, not Kamal Haasan, not George Bush, just good ‘ol me. I’m afraid I’m too chicken to check it out myself, but I’ll be dashed if it wasn’t me. What makes me so cocky about this? What tremendous feat have I accomplished to feel so sure?

I’ve completed 100 pages of a book. That’s what. You see, one of the ways I thought I’d kick-start my brain is this blog, the other was to become the voracious reader that I was, to become a ‘literary couch potato’ if there was such a term. I put the latter half of my two-pronged plan into action well before the end of 2008 by going to Waterstone’s at Canary Wharf and buying half a dozen books. I’m happy to report I’m down to the last of those books and its here that I have reason to celebrate.

You see, the last book I allude to is Executive Orders by Tom Clancy. The book only weights 2 tons, is 1,300 pages long, and is filled with text that is 9-point Times New Roman, in single line spacing. That’s not the point. I’ve gotten along fine with pillow-books with tiny print before – most of my textbooks in CA were fatter and 10 times as boring. What I can’t get along with is Characters. In the 100 pages I’ve managed to get through, there were 76 characters with no less than 10 sub-plots and seamless transition between plots. I’m all for seamless transitions, but not when the plots are not apparently and immediately related to each other. One moment the President of the United States is talking to his security advisor and next line is the President of Iran talking to his! Only an eagle eye can spot the switch in the story half way across the world!

Here, I also wish to put on record that I suck at names. So, for the first 50-60 pages, each time I come across a name that doesn’t ring a bell, I would dutifully flip back and see if the character has been introduced earlier in the book before saying hello to him/her for the first time. This diligence resulted in me taking approx. 3 weeks to finish the first 50-60 pages and I’m none the wiser as to whom is who. Add to this, the hero of this book is a bloke called Jack Middlename Ryan and Mr. Clancy uses any of the 3 names randomly to refer to the hero, a fact that I only realised around page 75, thereby ruining my understanding that there are 3 heroes in this book.

As if all this were not enough to throw one off track, the author deftly starts bowling googlies in the name of conversations. Consider this – the scene is a bunch of people sitting around a table and whining – for the sake of simplicity (see, I think about simplicity – TC doesn’t) let’s name them A, B and C. How would any author describe the scene?

“A, B and C were sitting around a table. A said to B, “I think this is blah, blah, blahdiblah”, then turned to C and asked him, “What do you think C?””

Not TC. This is how the same scene would look like in his book: “A and B were in the room sitting around the table. “ I think this is blah, blah, blahdiblah”, “What do you think C?”” Caught you running back to the top of the line to see where C appeared didn’t I? Now try doing this every alternate page and just for fun, substitute “A” with a name like “Domingo Chaves”, “B” with “Rusedsky Pavlovsky” and “C” with “Godknows Whattonamethis Character” and use either first name or second name at random and you begin to scratch the surface of what I’m going through here.

In Mr Clancy’s defence, he is a very good author and I am probably one of his slowest, dumbest readers, but hey, a guy’s gotta cater to all tastes if he’s writing pulp fiction.

Using my astute powers of reading minds, I know one of the wise readers of this blog are going to ask me, “If it’s so darn tough to read the book, why on Earth are you reading it?” My reply is this: when a dog chases a car, it really believes it’s onto something big and when it catches the car, its going to be good and so it chases and chases real hard. I’m doing the same. I believe that if and when I do understand the plot, it’s going to be interesting…



PS: another benefit of reading the book is this – try reading a book that is 6 inches thick on the tube and see how intelligent you look, it’s all about appearances! (wink, wink)