Recently I read the three books of Jonathan Maberry’s “Joe Ledger” series—thrillers that pull in aspects of science fiction and modern urban horror, with villains who seem to have fled from the James Bond movies. And before I really dig in, I’d like to note that I found them to be real page-turners; in fact, each of them kept me up late into the night when I should have been in bed. I plan to be somewhat critical further down, but that shouldn’t take away from the fact that I was thoroughly entertained, and will certainly buy any fourth book in the series.
The hero of the series is narrator Joe Ledger, an ex-soldier of great skill. Once a soldier, as the series begins he’s a cop with the Baltimore police, and has been effective enough there that he’s been tapped to join the FBI. Like Mark Vorkosigan, he’s also completely nuts—functional in his niche, and able to make use of his pathology in his chosen calling, but by no means normally sane.
As the first book in the series, Patient Zero, begins, Joe is still a cop. He’s part of a police strike team that’s raiding a Baltimore warehouse used by some kind of terrorist cell. While there he takes down a terrorist who despite looking not at all well is still absurdly strong—so strong that Joe is forced to kill him. And I do mean “kill him”; the process wasn’t at all equivocal. A day or so later he is picked up by some G-men in dark suits and taken to an undisclosed location where he is put face to face with the same terrorist, who though not precisely alive and well is clearly still keeping busy, and made to kill him all over again.
Yes, it’s a zombie novel, Jim, but not as we know it, because Maberry has it all dressed up in Science Fictional garb. (Or maybe this is typical these days; I’m not an aficionado of the genre.) This particular zombie, the “Patient Zero” of the title, is the victim of an engineered plague that turns people into zombies, complete with great strength, loss of intelligence, and a tropism toward human flesh. The plague is, of course, contagious, and is spread through the zombie’s saliva. One bite, and you’re off to a brave new world of mindlessness.
Ledger’s “captors” are representatives of a super-secret government agency, the Department of Military Sciences, or “DMS”. It’s the (apparently self-appointed) task of the DMS to be on the look-out for and put a stop to bio-medical threats, and our Joe has just been recruited to lead a DMS strike team.
Given the genre, it’s clear from the get-go that this is not a zombie-apocalypse kind of book: narrative causality dictates that Joe and the rest of the not-particularly merry band of DMS operatives will save the world in the very nick of time. The interest is in how it all plays out. This also means that the second and third books are not about zombies as such, but about other fiendish plans to destroy the world as we know it through bio-medical means.
Maberry has a knack for creating villains, very much in the classic James Bond vein. And I use the plural, “villains”, advisedly, because in each book there are at least two (or two sets), working together, not trusting each other, and each sure that they’ve pulled the wool over the eyes of the other. Watching the inevitable betrayals work themselves out adds a lot to the fun. (And the secret hideaways alone are worth the price of admission.)
I won’t say too much about the second book, The Dragon Factory, or the third, King of Plagues, except to say that I thought King of Plagues the weakest of the three, and the most susceptible to fridge logic—there were a number of things in it that contributed mightily to the atmosphere but simply don’t make sense in the world as Maberry’s presented it to us (Goddess, I’m looking at you!). Perhaps explanations will be forthcoming in some future book. The important thing for now is, if you like Patient Zero you’ll almost certainly like the two sequels.
OK, now that I’ve gotten that out of the way it’s time to pull out the Analytical Scalpel of Doom and start cutting. There won’t be any spoilers in what follows, and in fact the points I’d like to discuss are by no means unique to Maberry’s work. But they are tiresome, wrong-headed, and annoying where ever they are found.
The first thing is the pervasive consequentialism that fills this kind of book. The DMS are the “good guys”, but to do they work they rely on a nearly magical ability to suck any data they need from any computer without leaving a trace. So much for privacy. In ticking-time-bomb scenarios, which of course are frequent, they will grimly engage in torture of prisoners as needed to get the answers they need in order to save the world. Even Joe recoils from some of the things his boss, the steely-eyed Mr. Church, will do in order to complete the mission. The end justifies the means, and given the magnitude of the end almost any means are justifiable.
It’s true that given a necessary choice between two evils, one must choose the lesser of the two. But it’s also true, and usually forgotten, that the lesser of two evils is still evil. Please note, I’m not accusing Maberry of forgetting this. Joe seems to have some notion of this, at least sometimes, and Joe is by no means a normal human being. And certainly there’s no rejoicing in the lesser evil, but rather a fatigue, a sense that it was a dirty job that our heroes had to do. Still, I’d like to see someone pull it off in some other way.
The second thing is the portrayal of sexual perversion on the part of the villains, so as to titillate us while at the same time assuring us how icky they really are. There was a time when it was sufficient for the villain to simply plan to wed the Plucky Girl against her will; but now that the hero and heroine typically fall into bed together out of true love, or (even more typically) long before they’ve admitted any kind of true love, I suppose something stronger seems to be required. And I suppose it’s reasonable that a villain possessed of one vice (i.e., the desire to destroy the world) should be possessed of others as well. But does it always have to be the same one? And does it have to be on stage?
The third thing is what I call the myth of Big Evil. At some point in each of the books, Joe Ledge comes face to face with the gross enormity of what the villain has planned, and identifies it as “Evil” with a capital “E”, something to be opposed by all true men because there can be no cooperation of true men with EVIL (bom-bom-BOM). There are two problems with this. The first is that evil isn’t a positive thing: no man really pursues Evil for its own sake. What we call human evil is always the pursuit of some perceived good at the wrong time, in the wrong way, or to the wrong extent. Even the sadist is pursuing his own pleasure.
But that’s a minor point, at least in this context. The major problem with the myth of Big Evil is that it marginalizes every day, garden variety evil, the kind that true men cooperate with on a daily basis, even though they shouldn’t. Big Evil says that the little evils in my life, the little choices I make, the things done and left undone, aren’t really all that evil at all, aren’t even really worth the name. And that’s simply untrue. The fact is, I don’t need to come face-to-face with plots to destroy the world to come face-to-face with evil; I just need to get up in the morning.
Perhaps these things are simply part of the genre, which wouldn’t work without them. I dunno. But maybe there’s an opportunity for some genius to stand the genre on its head and have some fun with it.
The View from the Foothills 