MacCaulay
Banned
...and I've got to admit, I don't know if everyone who knocks it has actually read it or remembers it correctly if they have.
The book seems to be less a single narrative than a group of short character studies set around a single world that contains the same characters: similar in many ways to the film Southland Tales.
But I can honestly say that Ralph Peters manages to outdo some of the amazing heights he achieved in Red Army, as far as characterization. I always felt that the single best written scene in technothriller history was in Red Army, when one of the Soviet soldiers has a mental breakdown in the middle of West German department store, pulls off his uniform, and tries to dress like a civilian in order to defect from the army before one of his comrades finds him. What was amazing about that scene was that I remembered it as being 10 or 11 pages, but in reality it was only two or three at most: Ralph Peters is that good at piling narrative into tight spaces.
And in War in 2020, it's almost like he's taken the straight up war fiction that he worked with such amazing abilities on before and upped the ante by turning it into an art movie: the first chapter, about a US Army cavalry officer's lone trip through plague ravaged Zaire after having his helicopter shot down, could probably have filled an entire book. But it's almost as if Peters didn't want to spread out what he had and decided instead to stab you in the gut with these eerie images of women in bright red masks to hide their scars.
His introduction to the state of the (still existent) USSR, through the eyes of a woman undergoing an abortion, is a really masterful, dark way to get the reader directly into what the Soviet Union is like in this world, as well as the character we are looking through the eyes of.
She has cheated on her husband in the army with a civil service worker, who has paid for the procedure, and walks out of the clinic towards a long line to wait. For what? She doesn't know what will be at the front of the line: she only knows that that's where the food is and that's where she needs to be.
The message is clear within a few pages: this is a nation that doesn't feel like it has a future, and is turning it's back on it's military to look at other more pressing issues. Some writers could just say this outright, but Ralph Peters doesn't: he hits you in the gut and makes you feel it. That's why I like him so much.
Me personally, I think the book is an amazing piece of writing that's very misunderstood.
The book seems to be less a single narrative than a group of short character studies set around a single world that contains the same characters: similar in many ways to the film Southland Tales.
But I can honestly say that Ralph Peters manages to outdo some of the amazing heights he achieved in Red Army, as far as characterization. I always felt that the single best written scene in technothriller history was in Red Army, when one of the Soviet soldiers has a mental breakdown in the middle of West German department store, pulls off his uniform, and tries to dress like a civilian in order to defect from the army before one of his comrades finds him. What was amazing about that scene was that I remembered it as being 10 or 11 pages, but in reality it was only two or three at most: Ralph Peters is that good at piling narrative into tight spaces.
And in War in 2020, it's almost like he's taken the straight up war fiction that he worked with such amazing abilities on before and upped the ante by turning it into an art movie: the first chapter, about a US Army cavalry officer's lone trip through plague ravaged Zaire after having his helicopter shot down, could probably have filled an entire book. But it's almost as if Peters didn't want to spread out what he had and decided instead to stab you in the gut with these eerie images of women in bright red masks to hide their scars.
His introduction to the state of the (still existent) USSR, through the eyes of a woman undergoing an abortion, is a really masterful, dark way to get the reader directly into what the Soviet Union is like in this world, as well as the character we are looking through the eyes of.
She has cheated on her husband in the army with a civil service worker, who has paid for the procedure, and walks out of the clinic towards a long line to wait. For what? She doesn't know what will be at the front of the line: she only knows that that's where the food is and that's where she needs to be.
The message is clear within a few pages: this is a nation that doesn't feel like it has a future, and is turning it's back on it's military to look at other more pressing issues. Some writers could just say this outright, but Ralph Peters doesn't: he hits you in the gut and makes you feel it. That's why I like him so much.
Me personally, I think the book is an amazing piece of writing that's very misunderstood.
