The Final Reckoning
The Age
Saturday October 18, 2008
The Final Reckoning
Sam Bourne HarperCollins, $32.99 IN REAL LIFE SAM BOURNE is Jonathan Freedland, a journalist for Britain's Guardian newspaper, and this is broadsheet airport fiction rather than tabloid. A security guard at the UN in New York shoots someone he thinks is a suicide bomber but the victim turns out to be an elderly man and not in the terrorist profile at all. The UN calls in its fixer, Tom Byrne, to manage the situation and square things with the family but the family turns out only to be the man's daughter, Rebecca, who is not as pliable as he would like.Any more detail would be a spoiler: the book is efficiently constructed and even the digressions make sense in the larger scheme of things. The writing is plain and controlled; there's nothing to make you wince. His hero is a bit on the colourless side, but if the story is working well that hardly matters. There are some clever asides: "He (the UN Secretary-General, a Finn) embodied everything people liked about the Nordics: wholly professional, yet without Teutonic efficiency; informal, without American over-familiarity; progressive, without Latin fervour."Probably the best twist in the book is the one Bourne gives us in the author's note, where he tells us that what has seemed so incredible in his yarn is actually based in historical fact: there are tips for further reading that you may be tempted to take up.
© 2008 The Age