Review: THERE ARE NO SPEAR CARRIERS!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 5, 2014
Buy this book!Buy this book!Buy this book!And after you read it, if you like it, review it and recommend it to others.I am not related to the writer. I have no money riding on its sales. But I would dearly love to see the cinematic version of this funny, exciting, moving  story that makes you look in a different way at the faceless thugs that James Bond and assorted super secret agents used to dispatch in great numbers while fighting villains like Goldfinger and Dr. No. back in the day.Mark Jones is one of those faceless thugs - better described as the henchmen who do the dirty work of the major villains - or as known among the henchmen themselves as Agency Associates. The Agency is the hiring hall for supervillains , recruiting, training, leasing the services of men and women like Mark to fulfill whatever dastardly plots the villains are willing to pay for. Associates are the bad guys. The Agency will also rescue you and patch you up if you're not too far gone.It can be a good life because there is big money if you're working for a supervillain whose grand plan actually works.Of course, few Associates live to old age because (1) many supervillians are crazier than cattle munching on loco weed and are just as likely to kill their own henchmen as the good guys and (2) there are the good guys like Jack Tempest ( a smoother version of James Bond) and Rip Dunbar, a bulked up version of Nick Carter whose philosophy - in the immortal words of the Vietnam War - is "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out"- who persist in foiling the plots of bad guys over and over.So the Associates are the blue collar villains like Brit Mark who joined the Agency to escape prison, lives quietly in an English cottage when not on assignment, get married, have kids, go to pubs to get drunk and worry about making enough money to retire for good.Author Danny King shows us Mark nearly getting killed, battling the good guys, fighting to save his friends, and occasionally killing good guys which is part of the job. And thinking too often about a wife he's much better off without.King does a literary sleight of hand in which we are routing for Mark and his fellow Associates while the good guys become the pompous, arrogant and all too irritating  bad guys.The title may seem odd, but it is really what the book is all about. Associates have a lot of spare time on their hands and Mark leads discussions by computer among a growing group who read, discuss and rate some well known and some very little known novels as a way to pass the time. In the end, the Book Club becomes something very different and unforeseen.Mark's story is exciting, it moves, and it does make a lot of sense if there really were super villains and super agents battling in real life.As said before, I'd like the book if it were just for the plot and characters.But, in fact, it is much more.The central truth of "Book Club" has been explored by writers great and not-so-great, but for me, it was best summed up a lifetime ago by an SF writer named Alexii Panshin in a book with the statement: "There are no spear carriers."He was of course referring to plays and operas where there are always a few voiceless, nearly faceless, characters whose function is either to stand there holding spears, or to be killed off for the drama.You see them in the Stallone and Schwarzenegger movies where faceless villains exist only to shot down or blown up. In war movies, they are the legions of faceless enemies  who march into machinegun fire.But, of course, there are no faceless villains. They all have mothers and fathers, children, lovers, hopes and fears and reasons why they march into fields of fire.Mark Jones may have been a faceless thug at the beginning of this book, but by the end he is a man who displays couraqe, loyalty, regret, humor; a man who literally changes the world by his actions.Because of Alexii Panshin, I'm unable to  write my own work without seeing the characters passing by in the street, the waiter serving coffee, as people, people who have their own stories. And it's quite possible there will be readers of Danny King's work who will not be able to read stories of adventure without wondering, just for a moment, what the minor characters are up to when they're off the clock.Whether you get this book for free or have to pay, it's well worth buying and keeping.