Books in Brief: Thirty-Four East

Thirty-Four East, by Alfred Coppel (Harcourt, 434 pp., $7.95).

This is a surefire bestseller, a book actually as good as the claims made for it by the publisher’s dustjacket puffery. The novel of nuclear apocalypse is hardly new—Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove, and a score of pleonastic third rate hack jobs—but it has never been done this effectively. The setting is the Mideast, with the Americans and Russians at each other’s throats. The plot is a series of crises, unfolding at a gallop, leading up, with apparent inevitability, to the big bang. The tendency in the apocalyptic genre is to fantasize, to exaggerate current trends, and to people the novel with grotesques. But Coppel’s plot is a perfectly believable projection of today’s international situation into the future, and his characters, although types, are unusually well-rounded and believable. (Coppel is one of the few novelists around who can draw believable, complex military men without lapsing into caricature.) The Mideastern background is especially well handled, as is the technical detail; and the plan for a permanent Mideastern ceasefire is an ingenious one, far superior to anything developed by real-life diplomats. Which proves, in case we’ve forgotten, that good novelists tend always to be more imaginative and intelligent than the people who govern them.

JR

About the Author

John R. Coyne Jr.

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Thirty-Four East, by Alfred Coppel (Harcourt, 434 pp., $7.95).

This is a surefire bestseller, a book actually as good as the claims made for it by the publisher’s dustjacket puffery. The novel of nuclear apocalypse is hardly new—Seven Days in May, Dr. Strangelove, and a score of pleonastic third rate hack jobs—but it has never been done this effectively. The setting is the Mideast, with the Americans and Russians at each other’s throats. The plot is a series of crises, unfolding at a gallop, leading up, with apparent inevitability, to the big bang. The tendency in the apocalyptic genre is to fantasize, to exaggerate current trends, and to people the novel with grotesques. But Coppel’s plot is a perfectly believable projection of today’s international situation into the future, and his characters, although types, are unusually well-rounded and believable. (Coppel is one of the few novelists around who can draw believable, complex military men without lapsing into caricature.) The Mideastern background is especially well handled, as is the technical detail; and the plan for a permanent Mideastern ceasefire is an ingenious one, far superior to anything developed by real-life diplomats. Which proves, in case we’ve forgotten, that good novelists tend always to be more imaginative and intelligent than the people who govern them.