by James Clavell
Among the cast of hundreds in this 1,147-page saga are leftover characters from Clavell's Noble House and a descendant of a Japanese warlord from Shogun. The locale, however, is Iran. The action takes place in 1979 as the Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile in Paris, and chaos takes over the country. The Asian investment firm of Noble House has a fleet of helicopters servicing Iran's oil industry. The pilots are French, German, American, Australian, British and Finnish—your usual pulp-fiction international gang—and they are as close as Clavell comes to a focal point. Among the many reasons to avoid this novel are: (1) there is no single major character to help guide a reader through the confusing plot; (2) all the characters are rotten, motivated by greed (the Europeans, Americans and Asians) or fanaticism (the Iranians); (3) the unfamiliar Iranian names make it difficult to tell one character from another; (4) too many scenes are pointless, inserted to exploit a moment of cruelty or violent death; (5) there are maps and dates as chapter headings, but constant flashbacks add to the confusion; (6) the fictitious Texan in this novel, Conroe Starke, is the fantasy of a British writer who has seen too many John Wayne movies (Wayne, by the way, is not a Texan, as Clavell says, but was born and raised in Iowa); (7) if you want to read Whirlwinds bed, the book is so heavy that it crushes your rib cage; (8) the print is too small; (9) at the climax, the Finnish pilot and his royal Iranian wife who were being horribly menaced by a Turkish villain are, for no sensible reason, suddenly freed; (10) when a publisher pays $5 million for a book, as the publisher did for this one, a reader's expectations are grand, so being disappointed is doubly aggravating. Why was there no editor to shape this expensive, expansive mass of words into something enjoyable to read? Even the most devoted Clavell fan (for whom Tai-Pan is a fondly remembered tale of adventure) will find Whirlwind tough going. (Morrow, $22.95)
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