"The Saboteur" by Simon Conway

 A shoot-em-up video game of a book, The Saboteur gets its excitement from the number of characters killed and its verisimilitude from its precise descriptions of military hardware, ranks and tactics. Most of the minor characters are given potted biographies to serve as justification for their highly-simplistic motivations. There were too many characters for me to be certain I knew which was which; frankly, I didn't care. Few of them were any more than one-dimensional.

It was a little like a superhero film. The protagonist, Jude, was too wonderful to be believable. If he didn't have actual superpowers, he had extraordinary abilities. "He runs through a training sequence in Pencah Silat, the ancient martial art that he studied as a young man in the Indonesian archipelago" (Ch 12). Of course he does. It's a typical cliche from the genre. 

It is possible that highly trained commandos may have many of his strengths; the author has been in the army and may know people such as Jude. You might even argue that the world needs men such as Jude who never panics and who can act rationally and lethally in the face of great personal danger, despite sustaining huge levels of accumulated physical and psychological damage. But such people don't make interesting and complex characters that I want to read about. They don't make heroes. Humans make heroes and this protagonist is an automaton. 

To double down, the antagonist is a classic supervillain from the same sort of film. He, too, is apparently undestroyable and utterly one-dimensional.

If the characters are cliched, so is the plot. The whole thing was utterly simplistic and predictable. 

It was a page-turner but only because I was desperate to get to the end so I could read something more interesting.

One sentence I didn't understand refers to the acting Prime Minister: "Given the calumny the country faces, can he really be said to be running anything?"  Calumny means 'false accusation'. Does the author mean 'calamity'?

Selected quotes:

• "Artillery fire so thick it froths the air." (Ch 1)
• "Every death is ludicrous, if you think about it." (Ch 15) No one, but no one cares deeply about any of the scores of deaths (usually of anonymous people) in this book. 
• "The three holders of the Great Offices of State: the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary and the Home Secretary, a trio generally regarded as lacking the skills needed to cope with the complexities they face, bouncing from gimmick to cock-up in an unfocused panic about the consequences." (Ch 17) Of course the politicians are made to appear like self-important and corrupt buffoons: this author leaves no cliche unused.
• "She's tired of explaining that men do things because of money. Money and sex. It's time they worked it out for themselves." (Ch 19) Another cliche.
• "She had once told him that he would be her soul mate if only his soul was a different shape." (Ch 20)
• "The enemy of your enemy may also be your enemy." (Ch 57)

Boring.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God