I’ve long felt that one of the most difficult tasks for a novelist to pull off is creating the willing suspension of disbelief in the mind of the reader. It is for this reason that, with very few exceptions, the genre of Science Fiction leaves me cold. Almost always, I find myself feeling that the author is just spewing out an endless stream of whatever made-up nonsense came into his mind.
The exception to this is when the story asks its audience to accept a single impossibility (or near-impossibility) as fact, and the writer then weaves a “What if?” tale in which all the characters behave logically and consistently in the face of the one anomaly: What if a man somehow became invisible? (This has been done successfully several times.) What if a twelve-year-old boy found himself in a thirty-year-old body? (The movie Big, with Tom Hanks.) What if the South Africans developed a time machine that could take them and their equipment back to a date in the middle of the Civil War, but no earlier? (Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South.) Stephen King, of course, is the master of making his readers fall into a story with a central premise that is impossible.
Writers of political novels have considerably less leeway in what they can reasonably ask their readers to accept as a given. Political novels can’t ask us to believe something we think is impossible. The further they stray from existing conditions, the more likely the reader (this one, at least) will be unable to accept the imagined situation that the author lays out. In one infamous, racist (and excruciatingly boring) “novel,” the author gave us an America where, for racial reasons, rape was no longer a crime. Yeah, right.
In Unintended Consequences, set in the present day, the readers are asked to accept that a principal player in the BATF would arrange to plant evidence so as to invoke the asset forfeiture laws. Since BATF has been dinged in court before for doing just this, there should have been no suspension of disbelief there. Then readers had to accept that the BATF agent might have had the bad luck to schedule these illicit efforts when someone with skills and intelligence was watching, unseen, from nearby. Unlikely? Yes, but worlds away from impossible.
In Matthew Bracken’s first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic (also set in the present day), he asked us to accept that a principal player in the BATF would engineer a mass shooting at a football stadium and frame a homeless man for the crime, so as to increase nationwide antigun outrage and pave the way for his own BATF “strike team” with sweeping powers. Though asking us to believe a government agent would engineer premeditated mass murder for political advancement is a bit of a stretch, the “evil and overreaching government agent” is a common (and to my mind, perfectly acceptable) antagonist in the world of fiction.
Bracken’s sequel to EFAD, Domestic Enemies: the Reconquista, is set about five or six years in the future. Domestic Enemies’ underlying theme is the retaking of the Southwest by Hispanics who view this region as rightfully theirs. This is not a new concept for me; when I was in college in 1978, a Hispanic campus group calling itself La Causa espoused these same goals. My chief memory of them was that they seized control of and “occupied” the school’s snack bar to increase awareness of their plight. (They were unamused when I then told them, okay then, no cheeseburgers; fix me a couple of burritos with hot sauce instead.)
Domestic Enemies: the Reconquista doesn’t just ask us to accept that Hispanics want to retake the Southwest. It asks us to accept that in a few years they will have nearly completely achieved this goal. In Domestic Enemies, we are shown a New Mexico with a milicia to enforce existing fictional “Spanish only” and “land reform” laws. Storefronts with signs printed in English are regularly razed, and large estates owned by gringos are seized and turned over to formerly illegal aliens. All of this is done with official state sanction. The entire state of Arizona is a nightmare where the lack of a similar milicia means a constant state of siege between Arizona residents and invading hordes of thugs, similar to those Mel Gibson battled in Mad Max II: the Road Warrior, but with different accents. Citizens in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona regularly abandon their homes and take only what they can carry in their vehicles to the “free states” of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Got the picture?
Domestic Enemies asks us to assume an America circa 2011 that has secret detention camps for ordinary citizens, an America with hyperinflation (gold $7000/ounce, gasoline $30/gallon), an America that has replaced the old paper currency with new “blue bucks” at a 1-for-10 exchange rate, an America where lawlessness in the big cities and political corruption everywhere exceeds anything seen in real third-world hellholes in 2006. Is this too much to swallow? You be the judge.
The protagonist in Domestic Enemies is Ranya Bardiwell, the heroine of Bracken’s first novel. The story begins with Ranya escaping from an indefinite sentence at a detention camp after she learns that the son she gave birth to (and that was taken from her) upon her incarceration was adopted as a newborn five years ago by FBI agents in Albuquerque. Thus begins Ranya’s odyssey to track down and reclaim her son, and this is the central storyline of the book, set against the hellish backdrop of the Reconquista.
The Ranya of EFAD, Bracken’s first book, was a bit too saccharine for my taste (Snow White is who she reminded me of.) Five years of hard labor in the detention camp has tempered her considerably, and in Domestic Enemies, I found myself cheering Ranya’s pragmatism, inventiveness, and cunning. Without throwing any spoilers out, let’s just say she and Cindy Caswell would likely be kindred spirits…
Finding her son is Ranya’s main mission, and Bracken wisely avoids having Ranya singlehandedly stop the Reconquista. Instead, she picks her shots where she finds them, and manages to throw a few major monkey wrenches into the works of a corrupt government as she pursues her goal of reclaiming her son.
The second (and lesser) protagonist in the story is Alex Garabanda, the FBI agent who is the boy’s adoptive father. Alex has considerable domestic problems of his own, along with a growing alarm at what he sees in New Mexico, and the FBI’s unwillingness to do anything about it. Bracken strikes just the right tone with Alex, and with five-year-old Brian as well. Coping with these intolerable conditions are a diverse group of supporting characters who will likely remind you of friends you know; regular folks making the best of an awful situation.
Bracken gives us a great crop of antagonists, from Basilio Ramos, a note-perfect rendering of the archetypal vain Latin heartthrob who has discovered the joys of absolute power, to Homeland Security honcho Bob Bullard (carried over from EFAD), to the real-life bad guys you love to hate: billionaire socialist hedge fund operator Peter Kosimos, bipartisan socialist U.S. Senators Kelly and Montaine, and socialist former U.S. President “Weasel Dave” Whitman.
A couple of the minor bad-guy characters are a bit over-the-top, such as the Reconquista-loving college professor from New England, and the adoptive mother’s steroid-fueled bulldyke girlfriend (an IRS asset seizure agent), but I’d say they fall within the accepted realm of artistic license. There is one very minor character whose presence is so ludicrous and unrealistic that I think Bracken should delete him altogether from future printings of the novel, but maybe that’s just me.
The action in Domestic Enemies is exciting, and as plausible as you will find in works of fiction. The technical details, at least the ones where I have any expertise, are dead on. The question remains: Is the America of a few years’ hence portrayed in Domestic Enemies believable? This book addresses in fictional form a serious problem deserving of our attention: the problem of illegal immigration, “anchor babies,” and the long-term effects of a massive influx of people to our country who have no interest in adopting America’s culture of individualism. My fear is that the nightmare conditions Bracken asks us to imagine for 2011 America are so far from what we have now, that mainstream readers (and reviewers) will dismiss his book as delusional ranting. That would be a grave error.
JR
The exception to this is when the story asks its audience to accept a single impossibility (or near-impossibility) as fact, and the writer then weaves a “What if?” tale in which all the characters behave logically and consistently in the face of the one anomaly: What if a man somehow became invisible? (This has been done successfully several times.) What if a twelve-year-old boy found himself in a thirty-year-old body? (The movie Big, with Tom Hanks.) What if the South Africans developed a time machine that could take them and their equipment back to a date in the middle of the Civil War, but no earlier? (Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South.) Stephen King, of course, is the master of making his readers fall into a story with a central premise that is impossible.
Writers of political novels have considerably less leeway in what they can reasonably ask their readers to accept as a given. Political novels can’t ask us to believe something we think is impossible. The further they stray from existing conditions, the more likely the reader (this one, at least) will be unable to accept the imagined situation that the author lays out. In one infamous, racist (and excruciatingly boring) “novel,” the author gave us an America where, for racial reasons, rape was no longer a crime. Yeah, right.
In Unintended Consequences, set in the present day, the readers are asked to accept that a principal player in the BATF would arrange to plant evidence so as to invoke the asset forfeiture laws. Since BATF has been dinged in court before for doing just this, there should have been no suspension of disbelief there. Then readers had to accept that the BATF agent might have had the bad luck to schedule these illicit efforts when someone with skills and intelligence was watching, unseen, from nearby. Unlikely? Yes, but worlds away from impossible.
In Matthew Bracken’s first novel, Enemies Foreign and Domestic (also set in the present day), he asked us to accept that a principal player in the BATF would engineer a mass shooting at a football stadium and frame a homeless man for the crime, so as to increase nationwide antigun outrage and pave the way for his own BATF “strike team” with sweeping powers. Though asking us to believe a government agent would engineer premeditated mass murder for political advancement is a bit of a stretch, the “evil and overreaching government agent” is a common (and to my mind, perfectly acceptable) antagonist in the world of fiction.
Bracken’s sequel to EFAD, Domestic Enemies: the Reconquista, is set about five or six years in the future. Domestic Enemies’ underlying theme is the retaking of the Southwest by Hispanics who view this region as rightfully theirs. This is not a new concept for me; when I was in college in 1978, a Hispanic campus group calling itself La Causa espoused these same goals. My chief memory of them was that they seized control of and “occupied” the school’s snack bar to increase awareness of their plight. (They were unamused when I then told them, okay then, no cheeseburgers; fix me a couple of burritos with hot sauce instead.)
Domestic Enemies: the Reconquista doesn’t just ask us to accept that Hispanics want to retake the Southwest. It asks us to accept that in a few years they will have nearly completely achieved this goal. In Domestic Enemies, we are shown a New Mexico with a milicia to enforce existing fictional “Spanish only” and “land reform” laws. Storefronts with signs printed in English are regularly razed, and large estates owned by gringos are seized and turned over to formerly illegal aliens. All of this is done with official state sanction. The entire state of Arizona is a nightmare where the lack of a similar milicia means a constant state of siege between Arizona residents and invading hordes of thugs, similar to those Mel Gibson battled in Mad Max II: the Road Warrior, but with different accents. Citizens in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona regularly abandon their homes and take only what they can carry in their vehicles to the “free states” of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana. Got the picture?
Domestic Enemies asks us to assume an America circa 2011 that has secret detention camps for ordinary citizens, an America with hyperinflation (gold $7000/ounce, gasoline $30/gallon), an America that has replaced the old paper currency with new “blue bucks” at a 1-for-10 exchange rate, an America where lawlessness in the big cities and political corruption everywhere exceeds anything seen in real third-world hellholes in 2006. Is this too much to swallow? You be the judge.
The protagonist in Domestic Enemies is Ranya Bardiwell, the heroine of Bracken’s first novel. The story begins with Ranya escaping from an indefinite sentence at a detention camp after she learns that the son she gave birth to (and that was taken from her) upon her incarceration was adopted as a newborn five years ago by FBI agents in Albuquerque. Thus begins Ranya’s odyssey to track down and reclaim her son, and this is the central storyline of the book, set against the hellish backdrop of the Reconquista.
The Ranya of EFAD, Bracken’s first book, was a bit too saccharine for my taste (Snow White is who she reminded me of.) Five years of hard labor in the detention camp has tempered her considerably, and in Domestic Enemies, I found myself cheering Ranya’s pragmatism, inventiveness, and cunning. Without throwing any spoilers out, let’s just say she and Cindy Caswell would likely be kindred spirits…
Finding her son is Ranya’s main mission, and Bracken wisely avoids having Ranya singlehandedly stop the Reconquista. Instead, she picks her shots where she finds them, and manages to throw a few major monkey wrenches into the works of a corrupt government as she pursues her goal of reclaiming her son.
The second (and lesser) protagonist in the story is Alex Garabanda, the FBI agent who is the boy’s adoptive father. Alex has considerable domestic problems of his own, along with a growing alarm at what he sees in New Mexico, and the FBI’s unwillingness to do anything about it. Bracken strikes just the right tone with Alex, and with five-year-old Brian as well. Coping with these intolerable conditions are a diverse group of supporting characters who will likely remind you of friends you know; regular folks making the best of an awful situation.
Bracken gives us a great crop of antagonists, from Basilio Ramos, a note-perfect rendering of the archetypal vain Latin heartthrob who has discovered the joys of absolute power, to Homeland Security honcho Bob Bullard (carried over from EFAD), to the real-life bad guys you love to hate: billionaire socialist hedge fund operator Peter Kosimos, bipartisan socialist U.S. Senators Kelly and Montaine, and socialist former U.S. President “Weasel Dave” Whitman.
A couple of the minor bad-guy characters are a bit over-the-top, such as the Reconquista-loving college professor from New England, and the adoptive mother’s steroid-fueled bulldyke girlfriend (an IRS asset seizure agent), but I’d say they fall within the accepted realm of artistic license. There is one very minor character whose presence is so ludicrous and unrealistic that I think Bracken should delete him altogether from future printings of the novel, but maybe that’s just me.
The action in Domestic Enemies is exciting, and as plausible as you will find in works of fiction. The technical details, at least the ones where I have any expertise, are dead on. The question remains: Is the America of a few years’ hence portrayed in Domestic Enemies believable? This book addresses in fictional form a serious problem deserving of our attention: the problem of illegal immigration, “anchor babies,” and the long-term effects of a massive influx of people to our country who have no interest in adopting America’s culture of individualism. My fear is that the nightmare conditions Bracken asks us to imagine for 2011 America are so far from what we have now, that mainstream readers (and reviewers) will dismiss his book as delusional ranting. That would be a grave error.
JR
