The Wreckage
by Michael Robotham
Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
To be honest, I have not read a lot of thrillers**—which this book is. It says so right on the cover. In a blurb, under the author’s name, Nelson DeMille qualifies the book further by calling it “a high-octane thriller.”
I don’t care what you call the book, or what petroleum product you compare it to, just have a writer who can write, has a sense of humor (one of the reasons why Philip Roth is completely overrated), and characters that are believable. Put those three ingredients in a book and it doesn’t matter if the subject is as mundane as a man sitting on his porch watching the grass grow—you’ve got a very rare combination. The result is hard to explain. Like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography, “I know it when I see it.”
It’s also a plus to learn something. In The Wreckage I learned about the day to day dangers of being a journalist in the current Baghdad, which everyone knows, but there’s no way to feel the danger unless you are there. After 100 pages of this book, every noise or pillar of dust seems to be a precursor to violence, which nicely carries over to alternating “London” chapters.
In reality, I associate daily with psychopathic criminals. There is a man everyone calls Opie, with whom I used to play softball, before 50 of us were moved to Ionia where there is no softball field. Opie was a serial killer who, rumor has it, murdered over 60 prostitutes all over the world during his tenure as a sailor. He was called the “Port-of-Call Killer,” and has apparently been profiled on The History Channel. I have never seen it. I’ve known half a dozen men profiled on Cold Case Files, but The History Channel is the big-time of notoriety, featuring the most infamous of psychopaths, such as Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy, and Henry Lee Lucas.
Opie may be a bit moody, but he’s a decent guy. He played a pretty good first base, but I would not want to hang out with him outside these walls. Many of us in prison are decent people (I’m not referring to the pedophiles, who are in a completely different group of creep), but you get some liquor or drugs in us and we’re going to end up driving a stolen car through the front door of the police station. Or in Opie’s case, some poor working girl is going to meet an unfortunate end.
The point is: I do not want to climb Mount Everest. I don’t even want to get a headache from the low oxygen levels of base camp. I don’t want to interview the Vampire Lestat, or drink chianti with Hannibal Lecter, or write songs with Charles Manson. But part of me, and all of us who read, want to brush up against danger and strangeness.
The wonder of books is—if done right—you enter a world fascinating and dangerous and fun. If not done right, the work is forced and insulting. There is a delicate formula, like the making of whiskey, and no instructions for writing one. Good writing casts a spell, one I have always loved entering.
What more can a positive review say but that this book casts that spell and the reader’s life is better for having read it? The Wreckage has strong writing, great characters and fascinating events involving banks and missing Iraqi reconstruction funds. There is no pun intended when I say you will be richer after reading it.
**The most memorable thriller I ever read was Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, given to me by my father when I was in rehab in Centralia, Illinois, in 1991. The first war with Iraq was raging, Valentine’s Day was approaching, and Iraq was sending SCUDs into Israel in the hopes of escalation. I was 23. The end of the world was a possibility. I needed a haircut and my legs would not stop vibrating.
Needless to say, reality and sobriety was a sensation that was not all that cool. It was a real treat to enter those dark and quiet submarines late at night. I could feel the impossible weight of the ocean trying to crush our submersible to a block of metal the size of a Matchbox car. I could feel the claustrophobia of the cramped quarters, hear the pinging of the sonar, feel the death that awaited us should the Reds find us out. All of this seemed like heaven compared to the hell of life straight-up.
We could smoke in the Stress Ward of St. Mary’s, and sometimes a helicopter would land in the field across the road. Through the window of our three-man room, I could watch the medical staff wheel patients on gurneys out to the waiting chopper. I would smoke my Salem Light, close my eyes and listen. Jason, the eighteen-year-old in the next bed over, listened to Metallica way too loudly through his earphones. He was trying to avoid jail by voluntarily getting clean before his court date, after he and a couple of buddies had stolen the change from vending machines all over the county. When they were arrested they had been making their way to Vegas, where they were going to parlay the coins into real riches. He needed to turn down the volume, otherwise the Russians were going to hear the thump of the double bass drum. He was going to get us all killed. It seems impossible, but you can hear for miles underwater.
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