Review: Difficult to follow
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 09 5, 2013
THE TSUNAMI CONNECTION by Michael Gallagher centers on an orphaned, kibbutz-raised Israeli woman named Kefira who is a Mossad field agent. Her quest at the outset appears to be revenge for an attack on her team, but the story broadens out to encompass much broader objectives.There are many concurrent stories in THE TSUNAMI CONNECTION, one being that the Russian mafia is in possession of a nuclear submarine that carries a weapon supposedly capable of causing a powerful tsunami. There is no mention of how criminals could get their hands on a nuclear submarine, operate it and modify it, or of any international efforts to recover it. I found that unbelievable.The author's main focus was apparently to let the crooks deploy the tsunami weapon in the ocean near Banda Aceh, one of the localities devastated by the tsunami following the Sumatra-Andaman earthquake of 2004.Another continuing storyline is protagonist Kefira being controlled by her supposed adoptive parents Sam and Yochana, who have vaguely-defined but high positions in Israeli military black ops. These parent-daughter interactions emerge throughout the book, and frequently conflict with accepted military discipline in the field.The good guys are apparently unable to prevent the activation of the tsunami weapon, and it creates a 15-metre tsunami, witnessed by a Banda Aceh farmer and his daughter as it engulfs their village and kills them. Oddly, the book makes no mention of the widespread devastation and other consequences, such as the likely deaths of 300,000 people living in coastal Indonesia. A tsunami is not a local event.Aside from the one brief scene, I never found out what happened as a result of the tsunami. Those are high stakes indeed, but the sense of so many lives being important is missing from this book. The following chapter is an unrelated foray into Kefira's childhood, which concludes with her participation in a political assassination at an early age.Fiction generally is about high stakes in a situation where time is running out and there is only one person in position to save the day. Writing is about creating a series of images in the reader's mind, but the images created by writer Gallagher come in a flood of disjointed ideas that do nothing to build plot, storyline, or character.The author's choice of a female battlefield commander is a good one, as women are better at multi-tasking than men. They size up situations more quickly, and it's easier for females generally to set aside their egos and focus on the mission. This trait, however, is one that protagonist Kefira does not possess, as shown by her many tactical blunders throughout the story, beginning with the loss of 17 troops and a helicopter in the opening pages. She is never called to account for this mistake.I read black ops fiction in part to experience that world. I did not feel the presence of solid research behind Gallagher's book. One example is around rank structure and female leadership. In spite of Kefira being called Colonel, the Mossad is a civilian service and there are no military ranks. Many Mossad agents are former IDF, which does have rank structure, but it is never mentioned that Kefira was IDF. If that had been the case, the Israeli troops would have called her 'Aluf mishne', so she would not bear the rank of Colonel for any reason.I felt I was being told the action of a story while being kept away from the story itself. As I left each chapter behind, I had no sense of rising action or increasing suspense, I was simply dropped into an unrelated event stream in another country or another time. I was not aware of a plot, and the whole idea of suspense is missing from this book. There is little foreshadowing of events. Readers are expected to be satisfied that the inexplicable scene-hopping is necessary, but I did not find the puzzle filling in and giving me the chance to guess ahead as to the outcome.Scene-setting in Gallagher's writing is often done after the fact. Action starts, then we find out where it is and to what destination it is headed. Historical facts are inserted to explain the action as needed, but they come off as casual and unimportant. The initial attack sequence is placed where the historical Exodus led by Moses is said to take place. However the writing here can be misread as Moses somehow following the helicopters in the present.This is but one of many passages in the book that suggest it is in need of a re-write and careful editorial attention. Throughout the text are frequent punctuation errors and missing open or close quotes that slow the reading and cloud meaning. There are many unusual or incorrect word choices and stilted phraseology that require re-scanning, and prevent immersion in the story itself.In the end, Kefira is disgraced and demoted, and winds up with her old desk job and in the care of Sam and Yochana, her adoptive parents. Unbelievably, in spite of her many errors of judgment throughout the book, she is to be a teacher at a Kibbutz. It's an anticlimactic ending to a book that is hard to figure out from the start. A hero's journey it is not.I read this novel twice through to be certain I wasn't missing anything. I re-read many sections, and made searches of many terms to fully understand the sequence. Regretfully, I am not able to recommend this novel, or give it a rating higher than 2 stars.