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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Dragon Still Breathes Literary Fire,
By
This review is from: The dragon (Paperback)
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many different people from various walks of life have found cause for celebration. Many, that is, except for those writers who saw in the demise of communism a loss of a worthy mine for stories that pitted the democratic West against the tyrannical communist bear. The grinning villains of the KGB and the sadistic officers of the GRU can now be found only in novels like THE DRAGON. Alfred Coppel's 1977 novel is typical of the military, techno-thriller genre so popular of that time. THE DRAGON is better than most of its ilk in that it has a full rogue's gallery of believable bad guys, many of whom battle each other as much as they do the hated democracies.The introductory chapter is quite effective in setting the stage for later developments. One of the KGB's top operatives, Colonel Choy Balsan, is alone on horseback in Red China, seeking to find information about a supersecret laser cannon, the dragon of the title, so that he may destroy it. He fails in his mission, but he manages to radio its location to his superiors in Moscow before he is captured by Red Chinese soldiers. When Balsan runs out of bullets, Coppel's writing style effectively sets a manly prose style so lacking in others who try but fail to capture the essence of a man buying time with his life: 'It was then that he knelt, and drew the double-reflex horn bow of his ancestors. Five young soldiers of the People's Liberation Army fell with Mongol arrows in them, dying an archaic death as the armored vehicle, spitting machine-gun fire like some mythic Asian monster, rolled over Choy Balsan.' Fully half of the book is from the perspective of the top leadership of the communist party. The First Secretary of the Soviet Union, Valentin Kirov, the absolute ruler of all the Russias, is a sick and dying man, but he knows not only of the danger posed by the Dragon but also suspects that his top soldier, Defense Minister Leonov, is plotting a coup. Yet, he does not see a connection between the two. Leonov plans to destroy the Dragon using nuclear missiles at his command from his base, thus presenting his boss with a fait accompli: follow up the limited strike on the Dragon with a general full strike on all of China's nuclear bases. The plot then involves the working out of his hopes. Along the way, the reader finds the expected sex scenes with full-breasted female Russian military officers seducing those who stand as a threat to Leonov. Further, the reader learns of the inner workings of the top leadership of the Chinese communist Politburo. There is plot, counterplot, assasination, and last minute strategies that will determine the fate of the world. Coppel manages to convince the reader that if history did not actually turn out the way that he says it might have, then the reader will easily accept the result of the last few chapters. Coppel is such a talent that when I finished his book, I felt that I knew his alternate reality better than I did the actual one, and that, I think, is the hallmark of any top-notch writer of fiction.
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