Customer Reviews

Come Nineveh, Come Tyre

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

'Come Ninevah, Come Tyre' ends the Advise and Consent series, which should be required reading in our secondary schools. It shows the fragility of the American republic when subjected to the excesses of extremists, be they on the right or on the left and how easily the media and public can be mislead by charismatic or "righteous" leaders. The lessons herein apply in today's America just as much as they did in 1973--it can happen all too easily, leading us to the wrong places for all of the seeming "right reasons."

Drury paints all too well, in almost Orwellian fashion, how "patriotism" in the hands of the ambitious and egotistical can become a dangerous weapon indeed. In addition to being well written and highly enjoyable to read, this seven-book series is classic, timeless and disturbing for those who worry about the future of their nation.

author of THE SWAN: Tales of the Sacramento Valley

I did not like the bad language throughout the series, thus the 4 stars instead of 5. You really should read the other books in the Advise and Consent series by Allen Drury, but if not, you should try to read Come Ninevah, Come Tyre (CNCT), then follow with Promise of Joy. These two books take off at the same starting point, then there is an assassination, and all things are different after that. In Promise of Joy, the "liberal" presidential candidate is assassinated along with the conservative candidate's wife. What happens when a conservative becomes president with liberal media and liberals in Congress...is what this story is all about. In CNCT, the "liberal" presidential candidate and the "conservative" candidate's wife are left alive after their spouses are assassinated. What then ensues could be what's happening today (2010). Will the "liberal" press come to its senses before its too late? Although the enemy in this series of political thrillers is Russia, it could very well be whoever the current "enemy" of the US is...great stories and so close to what this country is going through, it's amazing these books were written in the 1950-1960s.

This book, the fifth installment in Allen Drury's "Advise and Consent" series, details the very brief presidency of Edwin Jason. President Jason, launched into the White House by the efforts of numerous violent groups, is an unwitting pawn in the hands of enemies of the United States -- with tragic results.

In this novel, we say "good-bye" to many of the characters we have come to know and love from the previous four novels -- quite a few in a violent fashion.

This book is dated -- no question about it -- but the underlying truths expressed by Mr. Drury are still valid -- even if the Cold War IS over and the Soviet Union is no more.

This is one of two climactic novels in Drury's "Advise and Consent" series, branching off from the cliffhanger assassination at the end of "Preserve and Protect". In this novel, it's Ted Jason, the mediagenic, liberal governor of California, who survives the attack (although losing his beautiful wife) and goes on to become President.

In Drury's scenario, the election of Ted Jason and his first few weeks in office set up catastrophe for the United States and its allies, as he basically acts like what every Cold War-era conservative's worst nightmare of a liberal, "peacenik" President (worse than Eugene McCarthy! worse than George McGovern!! worse even than Henry A. Wallace!!!) is conceived to be capable of. He not only abruptly pulls U.S. troops out of Panama and the fictional African nation of Gorotoland - which predictably leads to disaster, ending up with U.S. prisoners of war being paraded through Red and Tiananmen Squares - but announces huge cuts in defense spending and troop levels. Equally predictably, the USSR grabs the opportunity offered it with both hands (and both feet!), "zerg-rushing" (to borrow the TV Tropes phrase) to grab every bit of strategic advantage it can.

Simultaneously, the sinister - and as some other reviewers have called him, Hitlerian - Fred Van Ackerman, senator from Wyoming, is launching his own plan to take over the country. Now, this part of the novel actually has some eerie resonances, though not in quite the way Drury intended when he wrote the book; the "Help America Act" that Van Ackerman rams through Congress with the compliance of the spineless Jason Administration, which sets up the groundwork for his (Van Ackerman's) dictatorship, bears some haunting resemblances, however faint, to certain real-life legislation.

However, overall the book is just too Anvilicious (to borrow another useful TV Tropes term) to make a good addition to the Advise & Consent series. Drury had a point to make - that too trusting an attitude toward the Soviet regime would lead to disaster for the U.S. at home and abroad - which was certainly highly arguable (I first read these books during the 1970's, when the USSR was still a real, and menacing, propostion), and I believed then, and still believe, that his core argument did and still does have merit. However...and this is a big HOWEVER...Drury badly weakens his argument by deploying too many strawmen and putting them to the service of a totally implausible plot (in the real world, to cite just one example, the U.S. would NEVER react as spinelessly as Drury has the Jason Administration react, or fail to react, to armed Soviet incursions into Alaska). If I can borrow just one more TV Tropes term (I love that website :) ), Drury has handed the United States the mother of all Idiot Balls in this book and forced the country to run with it to make his heavy-handed point.

"The Promise Of Joy" is a much better novel (see my review elsewhere), IMO; it actually puts you into the President's position in a moment of ultimate crisis and makes you think about what you would do to handle that crisis. "Come Nineveh, Come Tyre" simply recounts Drury's worst nightmare, and not too convincingly either.

Allen Drury is best remembered as the master of the political potboiler. Most notably Advise and Consent for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. Come Nineveh, Come Tyre is another lengthy Washington based novel featuring a number of the same characters as Advise and Consent.

Drury completed Come Nineveh, Come Tyre in 1973. It takes place in a futuristic United States (telephones have been completely replaced by picturephones and the number of Americans voting in the presidential election exceeds 190,000,000). Or perhaps this is a United States which occupies an alternative universe since mention is made of Richard Nixon having completed two full terms as President. Apparently Drury's prognosticating prowess was not developed enough to entertain the possibility that the newly re-elected Nixon might not complete his second term.

In any event, Come Nineveh, Come Tyre is the depressing tale of the ill-fated presidency of Edward M. Jason, a progressive and peace loving Californian who wins office in a landslide while carrying with him a solid majority of like minded Congressmen and Senators. The author contends that in a United States where media and academics have long been dominated by liberal thinkers, having liberals also control the White House and both houses of Congress is a sure formula for political disaster the likes of which dare not be imagined.

In the doomsday scenario presented in Come Nineveh, Come Tyre, the inauguration of President Jason leads in a few short weeks to a suspension of the Bill of Rights and complete military subjugation to the tender mercies of the Soviet Union.

Now, there's no reason fiction, particularly political fiction, shouldn't have a distinct point of view. That's one of the privileges of authorship. But there are limits and Drury's unapologetic heavy handedness ignores those limits. Not recommended.

This is a story of what COULD have been, if the Soviet Union and the American Left had had their "kindly" way with humanity.

RECOMMENDED!

Come Nineveh, Come Tyre", is one of the last entries of a prolonged political saga that Alan Drury began with "Advise and Consent". (Luckily, Drury encapsulates the the action of the prior books in a preface to this one; he also includes a list of the main characters). By "one of the last" I mean that it is one of two alternate finales to the "Advise" saga. At the end of the last book (which I didn't catch), an assassin kills one of two front-runners for the oval office. The victim identity - and our nation's fate - is resolved in both this book and its companion "Promise of joy". In "Promise" the heroic Orrin Knox survives to save America (and the world) from wooden-headed liberals. In "Tyre" it's king liberal himself, Ted Jason, who survives and ruins the country on becoming the president. Jason's platform is that of "peace" (which means dismantling the nation's status as a global superpower and its policy of confrontation with the Soviets). No Stalinist booster, Jason is nevertheless an outright stooge of the hardcore Soviets - convinced that their wish for peace reciprocates his own. But those familiar with Alan Drury know that this path invites disaster. In every global arena, a backward step by Americans is matched by an aggressive Soviet leap forward. Yankees pulling out of Africa are routed by a Soviet army; US advisers are rounded up and sent to camps in the Ukraine; American ships are sunk by Russian warships disguised as trawlers; Alaska is briefly occupied. In every case, the Jason administration faithfully clings to its sincere belief that all Soviets are good people just surrounded by nasty advisers - and that its more important to deal with opposition at home than commit warfare everywhere else. In every instance, Jason's refusal to resort to war (as well as every episode of the Soviets' refusal to resort to anything else) is championed by the craven, unelected plutocracy that is the American media, and enforced by leather-jacketed thugs.

Believe it or not, I've been called a right-wing stooge in my time, and not without reason. But I just couldn't buy Drury's fable. His perspective on both the Soviets and their willing accomplices (the media and ambitious, amoral politicians) alternates between arch sarcasm and overt antipathy, without the slightest nuance. The evil of liberal politicians - embodied by the Fred Ackerman and JB Swarthmore - seems most pronounced because their lack of depth: they'll do anything for political gain. The media (mostly named only according to their publications - a persistent Drury quirk) seems to have been driven insane with a new-found power to make Americans believe utter nonsense (the Russians are our friends - we're just a pack of evil imperialists who've long had it coming). The Russians themselves don't so much as speak as swagger in mindless triumph, careful to place the credit where it belongs (for their evil, the Soviets are little more than a force of natural evil; the real blame always lays firmly with domestic liberals and the media). Having taken pains to demonize the Yankee-left, the Russians themselves appear neglected, and their dialog wouldn't be enough for the villains of a second-rate Bond parody.

Strangely, Drury's politics have nothing to do with the novels' problems because politics has nothing to do with the story. Drury's anti-Soviet plot make the case clear enough to elude debate, and only willfull blindness to Russian aggression allows it to survive. Otherwise, the combatants themselves are interchangeable - nothing about them defines them as left or right, conservative or liberal, GOP or DNC. In 2001, it would take little re-writing to make "Come Nineveh" an indictment of the right - replace the Soviets with OPEC, the media with big business, America's dominance in military power with its economic power, and just swap left-for-right.

There's so much hot-air prose here about liberals and conservatives that it's easy to forget that the book never really identifies either of the two. Rather, the story relies on our bringing our own prejudices to the story - which Drury highlights in a foreword in which he warns readers that his prose won't sit well with those "who set the trends". The problem is that, when you put politics aside, "Come Nineveh" is worse than polemic - it's boring. The liberal media, and Yankee-bashing foreigners traverse the novel like a Greek chorus, courteously orating what's on everybody's mind. The "action" falls into a familiar pattern - Jason makes unwise overtures, the Soviets exploit them, the media reports dramatic American reversals at the hands of the Soviets, then somehow save Jason's leftist administration from the repercussions of his ruinous policies - for hundreds of pages. By the end of story, you're almost praying the Soviets will win, if only put the entire exercise to rest. The only shock Drury leaves is this: for all of its tortuous history and dialog, this is essentially a Seinfeld version of the political novel, the potboiler about nothing.