"All most of us want to do is live our lives in peace, have our children, buy our houses, pay off our loans, play our sports, go on holiday. Few of us seek conflict. Who wants to see their cities bombed, their countries ravaged and their families killed? Surely it's a matter of common sense. So why did we do it?"
These are the last words of this frightening new novel. They're spoken by an international agent of Cuban-Scottish descent who's become a kind of hero. It's not giving anything away to quote them because they're there to be read in any bookstore. But everything that precedes them in this story is an attempt to answer that final question.This is not a book to cheer anyone up.
Its author is more aware than most of the horrors even the smallest of wars unleashes, let alone the nuclear one featured in his book. Nevertheless, his highly realistic appraisal of international relations, and especially in the Asia region, makes this imaginary story of future tragedy all too credible.
India and Pakistan stumble into war. Meanwhile conflict is also breaking out on the Korean peninsula. The North fires a missile at a US base in Japan killing 58 Americans, and in the border village of Panmunjom a South Korean lieutenant fires three shots into the head of his opposing counterpart, and then starts walking northwards.
The novel is set in the future, but it's meant to be a future not so very distant. China's president, Jamie Song, is an ex-law student from Harvard, a suave diplomat and businessman who speaks witty, idiomatic English.
The leaders of Pakistan and India are old friends, at least until the former is assassinated and the latter caught up in a devastating attack on the parliament building in Delhi. Scotland is voting on whether to part from the UK, there's been a coup in Brunei, and someone has broken into a key virology lab in Australia. Cuba, Russia and China are also inevitably involved. Most of the modern threats to peace and prosperity, in other words, make an appearance.
The frightening thought this book provokes is that in reality only half of them, if they were to happen simultaneously, could be more than enough to trigger a global catastrophe.
In this book a crisis develops just about everywhere in Asia where there could be one -- India and Pakistan, the two Koreas, the Philippines. Taiwan, remarkably, features in only a minor way when China launches an attack after just about every other highly armed state has already done so somewhere else. How do you make a political thriller like this come to life?
The method this author opts for is detail -- to have the Indian prime minister's daughter wear jeans and trainers and, while chatting on the phone to the US president's daughter, turn and ask her father if he'd like a word with her friend's dad; have a rebel in the southern Philippines concerned about his notebook's hard disk, and have the US president himself sniff the smell of spicy seafood wafting out of his National Security Advisor's wife's kitchen. Detail is all, and plenty of it almost guarantees that any book will ring true.
But when it's military or political detail, you'd better be sure you're getting it right. The fact that Hawksley does, as far as we can tell, get it right -- he is, after all, one of the BBC's most senior foreign correspondents -- makes this book even more terrifying as a credible scenario than it would otherwise have been.
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