I have to say, I haven’t read that story before, but I found this part to be pretty cool. Yeah, it’s a synonym dump, and it’s completely unnecessary to advancing any story, but it’s perfectly fitting as to what he was trying to say. It’s a novel idea executed fairly well.
Try reading a whole damn book written in this style and we’ll see if you still feel the same way.
It’s been 25 years since I read it, but I remember it wasn’t about action. I haven’t read any Heinlein since, if that’s a comfort.
I’ve read a few of Heinlein’s books and thoroughly enjoyed most of them, but I’m not a die-hard fan or anything. It just surprised me that an author as well-respected as Heinlein published a 550-page science fiction book about cross-dimensional travel, and probably 400 of those pages involved Nothing Happening. But it’s not philosophical, and nothing really happens. And not even in the Napoleon Dynamite or Seinfeld sense of “Nothing happens”- they only travel to two “interesting” places, of which one is already well known to most readers (Oz) and the other (British Colonial Mars) is included as an afterthought and not fleshed out in any meaningful way.
I can appreciate that it’s not supposed to be an “Action” novel, but whatever it’s supposed to be, it didn’t need 550-odd pages to be it in.
…and they had a plot?
Could you expand on this a bit? I loved The Afghan and I didn’t think there was much extraneous plot to it at all.
Anne Rice has done Armand’s story three or four times: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Vampire Armand and Blood and Gold. I don’t recall any major variations from telling to telling which would make three quarters of these redundant.
Tom Clancy’s biggest door-stopper was The Bear and The Dragon. It was about a thousand pages of various racial slurs against the Chinese along with a war that the USA wins in exactly three shots. Red Rabbit was a shorter book but filled in a gap in the timeline that no one had any reason to care about. I have described this book as “Tom Clancy wipes his ass and sells the result.” Rainbow Six ran long as well but I’m one of few who enjoyed that book. Teeth of the Tiger was about four action moments amidst four hundred pages of boring talk.
My major concern with The Afghan was the sub-plot after The jet fighter crashed into the secret prison-cabin, conveniently killing Khan’s guards but allowing him to walk out uninjured, leading to a protracted chase across the mountain range and into Canada which ends with Khan being shot as he tries to make a phone call to warn his people there’s an imposter amongst them.
The whole thing could have been accomplished just as effectively, IMHO, by having the jet-fighter crash kill Khan, allowing Martin to continue the deception un-noticed- which is what happens anyway since Khan is shot before he can raise the alarm.
I recall the aforementioned parts taking up considerably more of the book than really seemed necessary, which disappointed me because usually Forsyth’s stuff is absolutely brilliant and well-paced.
No arguments here; although like yourself I also enjoyed Rainbow Six despite the length. I think Mr. Clancy’s problem in his later works is that after making Ryan President of the USA there’s really nowhere else for him to go. So you get very dry policy debates and People In Meeting Rooms Talking A Lot and not very much in the Things Being Blown Up and Clandestine Special Operations Stuff department as found in his earlier adventures.
Do we really have to spoiler box these old tomes? I’ll play along because I don’t want to ruin the surprise for anyone who wants to read The Afghan, which is an excellent book aside from the one improbable plot point we’re discussing.
[spoiler]I think there were two important reasons for Khan’s ridiculously coincidental escape:
- It showed him to be an actual badass, despite his long incarceration. I loved the bit where the Special Forces commander is told that he’s a mountain man. “From around here?” No, from the Tora Bora. “Saddle up!”
It did get a little improbable after a while though… he finds supplies, money, weapons, a horse, a special snowsuit that will shield him from heat detectors, a phone booth in the middle of nowhere, et cetera. But I didn’t think of it as padding because it was a good chase, as unlikely as the whole concept was. I thought the second ghost ship (The Dona Maria) was padding but the plot did come together at the end so it finally made sense. It just didn’t amount to much on first reading with ships getting hijacked over and over, all over the world. But ultimately it made sense.
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The whole idea hearkens back to Forsyth’s point in The Fist of God that the only reliable technology sometimes is the Mark I eyeball. The most fearsome gunship in the US arsenal levels an area the size of a football field and manages to miss the guy. Who ends up getting him? The sniper, with the only enhancement being the scope that lets him spot Khan.
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Hi Opal! There is also one other thing, which is the tragic mistake of not letting Khan make his phone call, which would have blown the whole plot wide open. This is similar to another plot point made in Avenger (which I am not sure if you have read so I’ll be vague) where doing the right thing leads to a bad guy getting away clean.
I don’t think Khan knew about the imposter though. All he knew was that the US was all set to release him but transferred him to the other prison instead. He never met Mike Martin during the transfer at Gitmo.[/spoiler]
Normally I wouldn’t bother with the spoilerboxes, but The Afghan isn’t that old and it’s the nature of Forsyth’s work that there are lots of twists and turns and I’d hate to give something away for someone who hadn’t read it yet.
I see what you’re saying and I got that interpretation from the book, but so what if the character in question was supposed to be a badass? Given the way the events in question pan out it becomes moot anyway, and I was left with the impression that Forsyth had a brilliant “A” plot in mind as part of a short story (like the one about the guy from Custer’s Last Stand in The Avenger) and his publisher said “Hey, find a “B” plot for this and we’ll release it as a novel!”
As you say, it’s a cracking read, but I just felt the entire “B” plot was entirely un-necessary.
Fair enough, it is a really good book and I’d hate to ruin the plot twists. However, I do have to say…
I loved the cameo when Izmat Khan is being treated for his wounds.
That was The Veteran. Avenger is the story of the former Vietnam tunnel rat who is trying to track down a war criminal from Bosnia. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it.
As for The Afghan, Izmat Khan is technically the title character so getting to see him in action is justifiable if you ask me. YMMV of course.
If anything in particular bugs me about The Afghan, it’s that it has the exact same ending as The Fist of God, which it is an indirect sequel to. The thematic tying together of the two novels is probably intentional but it doesn’t quite work for me.
I’ve read all of Forsyth’s stuff. Unfortunately the titles on his last three books all seem to run together in my mind for some reason :p. I’ll be interested to see what The Cobra is like- it’s due out sometime late next year, from what I hear.
Interesting point, but the endings aren’t quite the same… after all, Col. Martin doesn’t die at the end of The Fist Of God
Don’t be ridiculous. In the latest book, Ayla invented capri pants.
Aaaaggggghhhhhhhh!
I’ve been working my way throughVarney the Vampyre, and I now realize what it truly is.
Critics say that the book is inconsistent in mood, chronology, and continuity (Varney has three explanations for who and what he is), but it’s peretty clear to me that, as Varney was a periodical meant for teenaged boys, it’s basically a comic book. Saying it has a lack of consistency is like saying that the first 200 issues of Superman, taken as a unit, has no consistency.
I was wrong. At least those issues of Superman had self-contained stories. Varney promises to be a connected whole, albeit one that moves with glacial slowness (Varney attacks Flora on the first page. He doesn’t admit to being a vampire until page 155). The writing is much better than I thought it would be. But every now and then the author feels the need to slow thinhgs down even more. Then there’s more padding. Or Flora pulls out a manuscript and reads it (and so do we), and it’s a wholly unrelated story. Or The Admiral tells a story that happened at sea, unrelated to the plot (these stories within stories are illustrated. I have a feeling that they had the illustrations lying around and needed to use them up. Or maybe the artist challenged the author to try to work this into the story. ) every now and then they feel the need to pique the reader’s interest, so there’s a Startling Revelation! Or Somebody does something surprising! Or they say something that suggests an answer to the mysteries this far will be resolved!
But it never happens. They’re pulling out literary pyrotechnics to keep the reader hooked through the next installment. Anything to keep them coming for more, without resolving anything important, so the story can keep on going.
It’s Lost, in print. They’re using the same damned tricks over 150 years later – using flashbacks to keep telling a story in a different setting. Keep throwing odd little mysteries in, keep hinting that an Answer is juuuuust around the corner, that it’ll all make sense.
I hate Lost. I’m gonna give Varney a little bit more of a chance, but if he starts pulling the time travelling polar bear fog monster hidden chamber one-legged statue crap much longer, I’m axing him.
My vote still goes to the last Harry Potter book. I’m still mad about it and can’t get over how much worthless crap Rowling stuffed into that book. Pages and pages of drivel.
When a writer has an ideological agenda, as in Rand’s case (and perhaps also Norman with the Gor novels), I’m not sure that beating that drum incessantly should quite count as “padding,” however tiresome it may be to read. Padding to me implies stuff an author adds gratuitously to meet an expected word count, or possibly to fill up time in the context of the story. To Rand, plot and character were arguably “padding”.
And I’d definitely disagree about Tom Clancy. Whatever his other authorial faults, most of his “digressions” seem pretty functional to me. While his main characters are often criticized as “wooden”, some of those spear-carrying minor characters who get killed off or have a single important part to play end up being drawn pretty vividly. Simply saying that “our agent tracking the terrorist leader was killed, and we lost the trail” may sound kind of deus ex machina, while taking the time to get to know the agent, as if he’s going to play an important part, and then describing how he slips up and gets killed, is a worthwhile addition in terms of both logic and drama.
Even Clancy’s trademark technical rambles (e.g., the Alfa sub’s faulty coolant valve in The Hunt for Red October usually function effectively this way. I can think of a few Clancy subplots that feel gratuitously tacked on (e.g., the chained logs and submarine in The Sum of All Fears or the cement mixer plot in Executive Orders, though they do arguably have a function as “red herrings” of a sort to keep the reader off balance as the various subplots unfold.
The criticisms of The Afghan remind me of The Mote in God’s Eye, where a very long digression in the middle of the book, while interesting to the reader, has absolutely no bearing on the plot, since the three Navy guys who end up on the planet alone die without being able to warn anybody about what’s going on down there and they all have to figure it out on their own anyway. It almost seemed like a novella in the middle that had been expanded into the whole book or something.
Oh boy, you better not check out the 1001 Nights. 
Now I didn’t see it like that. To me, the point of that apparent digression was to let the reader see the Moties’ true nature first hand. Much more effective than just telling us. This gives the dramatic tension through the latter stages of the book as you scream “Watch out! Don’t let them out into the galaxy…”
I have – I’ve got the complete 20-volume Burton translation.
not even close – although the 1001 nights gives you stories within stories within stories (up to seven layers deep), it does resolve them in a reasonable amount of time*. Padding it ain’t
*Except the framing story, of course, but you pretty much expect that.
I agree with this - I liked the adventure of the mids. It’s a good story on its own, and it introduces a type of Motie the Navy ships hadn’t seen, as well as their whole population issue. It leaves you holding your breath during the negotiations, and with an irresistible urge to smack Dr. Horvath upside the head.
I think a lot of the later Honor Harrington books suffer from padding, or at least endless political exposition.