Ukrainian File
KARATNYCKY, ADRIAN
Ukrainian File The Devil's Alternative By Frederick Forsyth Viking. 432 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Adrian Karatnycky Contributor, "Commonweal" "New Republic" Though Frederick Forsyth began to...
...At the center of the novel is the problem of dissidence within the USSR...
...Similarly, Forsyth's glimpses into the inner workings of the Kremlin range from the convincing to the cliche-ridden...
...The kernel of the plot is this: A group of Ukrainian and Jewish terrorists, fighting for their personal freedom and their nation's independence, assassinate the head of the KGB...
...While it acknowledges Soviet expansionist impulses, the solution of the plot presumes continued East-West cooperation...
...And unless its population increases by 20 million in the next two years, the Ukrainian SSR will not have 70 million inhabitants by 1982...
...Surely someone who claims to have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars staging a failed African coup d'etat to assure accurate background information for The Dogs of War could have invested in a good reference book...
...The author has anticipated trouble in disarmament negotiations, the use of grain sales as a political weapon, and Ukrainian emigre terrorism...
...If The Devil's Alternative is the first novel of Cold War II, it is firmly wedded to the assumptions of detente...
...Forsyth's new saga features such plausible or actual details as a Soviet crop failure, a power struggle between the hardliners and the moderates in the Kremlin, a supertanker spilling petrol into the North Sea, a Soviet President stricken by leukemia, a spy in the Politburo...
...The book is also marred by a surprising number of factual errors...
...There are some dissidents in the Soviet Union who commit terrorist acts or condone violence as a means of achieving their goals, but to link them to a tradition firmly rooted in legality is to suggest what the KGB would be only too happy to prove...
...It would have served Forsyth better either to have invented wholly new characters or to have given us the real items...
...President, a "superhawk" National Security Advisor who also happens to be Polish, and a female British Prime Minister are disappointingly one-dimensional...
...Forsyth's novel is a hybrid...
...Yet if Forsyth's strengths are apparent in The Devil's Alternative, so are his weaknesses...
...He invents, for example, a new technological arsenal: guns that emit sounds powerful enough to stun an opponent, delayed-reaction poisons, and mind-altering drugs capable of inducing partial amnesia...
...nor is it correct to say they "read and write with Roman letters, not Cyrillic...
...Forsyth does a commendable job of painting the political background: He carefully traces the contours of the "nationalities question," and faithfully reflects the points of view of the Ukrainian and Jewish dissidents...
...And he is simply clairvoyant when he has his chief of British Intelligence tell the Director of the CIA about a Soviet troop build-up in Afghanistan...
...President chooses to kill the terrorists, thus insuring at the same time that the death of the head of the KGB will remain a secret to the world...
...Reviewed by Adrian Karatnycky Contributor, "Commonweal" "New Republic" Though Frederick Forsyth began to write his latest thriller, The Devil's Alternative, two years ago, it could have been provoked by today's newspaper headlines...
...That and other acts of terrorism lead to an unraveling of the larger fabric of treaty negotiations and trade agreements, and finally bring East and West to the precipice of war...
...Splendid in his global perspective, he is often careless and inaccurate in his descriptions of particular places, movements and psychologies...
...These episodic strands are brought together in the final pessimistic resolution: Faced with a situation in which some people will have to die-A conundrum known as the "Devil's Alternative"-the U.S...
...But it strains credulity to suggest that anyone inspired, as these terrorists are said to be, by the writings of such democratic opponents of the regime as Vyacheslav Chor-novil, Semyon Gluzman and Mykhaylo Osadchy, all of whom have argued for nonviolent and open forms of dissent, would adopt the tactics of terror...
...Yet Forsyth has his Maxim Ru-din, the ailing President of the USSR, state in a closed-door Politburo meeting, '"Had we ever believed [Americans were paper tigers] we would surely already have completed the process of liberating the captive masses from Fascism-Capitalism to Marxism-Leninism.'" The Western leaders in the book are not very credible either...
...We think,'" says the Englishman, " 'that they may be mounting a move towards Pakistan and India through the passes.'" Prophecy aside, Forsythe demonstrates here many of his more familiar strengths-Above all, his ability to create a complex web of events relating the ambitions of individuals to the fate of nations...
...For all that, Forsyth is a skillful manipulator of the genre who builds tension by constantly shifting the scene and unexpectedly twisting the plot...
...Certainly no one today believes that the Kremlin leaders, in their highest councils, speak the language of their propaganda...
...As it is, his portraits a clef of a soft-spoken Southern U.S...
...The international status quo is preserved...
...Often unexplained, these abbreviations, are part of the author's strategy of lulling the reader into feeling he is an insider...
...Ostensibly about chaos and terrorism, the novel implies that there is order and meaning behind every seemingly random event in the world of international relations...
...Ukrainians are not "overwhelmingly Uniate Catholics," they are predominantly Orthodox Christians...
...The Devil's Alternative is enlivened by the kind of realistic effects Forsythe is famous for...
...We are also given a sensory overload of SR-71s, GSG 9s (an "ultra tough" German commando unit), SISs, SDECEs, and the like...
Vol. 63 • April 1980 • No. 7
