Books in Brief: The Devil’s Alternative

The Devil’s Alternative, by Frederick Forsyth (Viking, 432 pp., $12.95). The time is 1982, and a man is found drifting in the ocean off the coast of Turkey. When he is taken aboard a small Italian freighter, events are set in motion that will bring the world perilously close to nuclear disaster, in this latest novel by Frederick Forsyth (author of Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, and The Dogs of War). In Russia there is a failed grain crop of such proportions that it could lead to starvation and riots; then Ukrainian Jews, with help from Ukrainian loyalists in other countries, assassinate the chairman of the KGB; next a Swedish supertanker loaded with oil is hijacked, and as if all these tension-producing events were not enough, add a Russian secretary who has become disenchanted with the Soviet system and, under the code name of Nightingale, begins to pass high-level secrets to the British government through her former lover, an agent for the SIS. Forsyth apparently works on the principle that if a little bit is good, a lot more is even better, and so he layers tense scene on tense scene and plot on plot. Unfortunately, it is all a little too much, and, despite the fact that Forsyth juggles all these diverse elements rather skillfully, one keeps having visions of a high-budget disaster movie sprinkled with famous faces in cameo roles—which is okay, if you are writing a movie script to begin with. In fact, The Devil’s Alternative may make a better movie than it does a book. It is certainly not literature, and as entertainment it rates only fair.

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Norma Hawes

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The Devil’s Alternative, by Frederick Forsyth (Viking, 432 pp., $12.95). The time is 1982, and a man is found drifting in the ocean off the coast of Turkey. When he is taken aboard a small Italian freighter, events are set in motion that will bring the world perilously close to nuclear disaster, in this latest novel by Frederick Forsyth (author of Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, and The Dogs of War). In Russia there is a failed grain crop of such proportions that it could lead to starvation and riots; then Ukrainian Jews, with help from Ukrainian loyalists in other countries, assassinate the chairman of the KGB; next a Swedish supertanker loaded with oil is hijacked, and as if all these tension-producing events were not enough, add a Russian secretary who has become disenchanted with the Soviet system and, under the code name of Nightingale, begins to pass high-level secrets to the British government through her former lover, an agent for the SIS. Forsyth apparently works on the principle that if a little bit is good, a lot more is even better, and so he layers tense scene on tense scene and plot on plot. Unfortunately, it is all a little too much, and, despite the fact that Forsyth juggles all these diverse elements rather skillfully, one keeps having visions of a high-budget disaster movie sprinkled with famous faces in cameo roles—which is okay, if you are writing a movie script to begin with. In fact, The Devil’s Alternative may make a better movie than it does a book. It is certainly not literature, and as entertainment it rates only fair.