The Fox

The Fox

  - Frederick Forsyth

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Where do I begin to describe the problems with this book?

Themes:
- Aspergers: The over-hyped (and rather incorrect) stereotype of this disease on the Autism spectrum endows its sufferers with uninhibited genius, with the only downside being a lack of social skills.
- Computer Hacking: The whole premise of this book is based on hacking, but there is not even the slightest indication of how the boy genius achieves the impossible - breaking into the most sophisticated security systems all over the world - and takes only a few hours to do it.
- White Supremacy: West is the epitome of all-good - with the UK being the benevolent protector of the world, the USA can be tolerated, and the rest of them are either uncivilized or 'enemies of the world' (or both) - Russia, Iran, North Korea, China. I don't disagree with some of this as far as terrorism goes, but this 'savior of the world' formula annoys me.
- Human weapon: Government manipulating and abusing the youth to execute what it considers to be the best for the world, risking his life most severely while doing so.

Narration:
- There is no single thread, except the UK saving the world from the worst tyrants on earth. It is just a series of events, one project per terrorist state - going into their security system, getting their access codes, and overriding it to cause complete destruction.
- It finds a very simplistic solution to deliver a happy ending - a solution that cannot be justified by any stretch of logical belief.

Writing Style:
It is perhaps the biggest problem of all. A great storyteller might have made something of this story, despite all the issues above. And that's why I felt it really wasn't written by Forsyth, several of whose books I have read and enjoyed. It seemed to be written by a novice, and the story outline may or may not have been provided by the author. I have read a few books where the outline was created by Alistair MacLean though the novel was written by another author - but the fact is clear from the cover page (and they are very well written even if not in the class of an original MacLean). But that was definitely not the case here.
- Too much info dump: It seems a primer on the world politics wrt the countries mentioned above, several security agencies, and a host of other things, some of which were not very relevant in the context of the story. For example, there is a 4-5 page description of the 9/11 terrorist attacks (does anyone need it in today's world?) only to explain why the US is paranoid about security. There are descriptions (factual or fictional, I am not sure) of some past spy maneuvers, to clarify that this is the strategy the spymaster used.
- The language: It is plebeian, even for my non-literary tastes. Feels more like a high-school kid's homework submission.
- Repetitions, an endless number of them: In phrases, adjectives, events, and use of multiple adjectives/synonyms when one would have sufficed. I lost the count of usages of 'the fat man' (for Kim, the Korean dictator), 'the master of all Russia', spymaster (for the protagonist), drunk (for Yeltsin), 'plundering of assets' (of Russia, under Yeltsin), fragile (for the youth), etc. I also did not need to be told repeatedly for my brain to register how Gorbachev lifted Russia and Yeltsin drowned it, how Weston escaped capture in the cafe, how the enemies' systems destroyed set them back millions of dollars and a couple of decades.

Best to avoid!