Time to Hunt by
Stephen Hunter
pbk out July 99
(Arrow)
at £5.99
The first thing to say about this book is - don't read the jacket! If you
do, you will learn of a plot element that does not occur until page 237. I do
have some sympathy with the anonymous editorial blabbermouth who wrote the
blurb, however, as this is a hard novel to summarise without giving away the
story. It begins with a prologue, set in the present, in which an unnamed sniper
is hunting Bob Lee Swagger - that's Bob the Nailer, himself a retired sniper,
and the relentlessly heroic hero of Hunter's Point of Impact and Black Light.
A shot is fired, a man falls dead, and we're off to Washington DC, in Spring
1971, where we meet a young Marine named Donny, and his fiancee who is in town
to join thousands of others in marching to halt America's war against the
people of Vietnam.
This is by far the most interesting section of the book. I have never
read a more thoughtful, well-informed account of the extraordinary events of
that year. Without using excessive hindsight or melodrama, and with a
painstaking avoidance of stereotypes, Hunter brilliantly brings alive a time
when it seemed as if the United States was on the verge of a kind of civil war
between the generations.
Donny, like many of his fellow conscripts, is sympathetic to the peace
movement, but he is also determined to do his duty. He doesn't consider
himself a "baby-killer"; just an ordinary kid trying to do his best in
impossible circumstances. But then a run-in with the spooks - who clearly
reckon that the real enemies of the republic are domestic dissidents, not
foreign communists - ends with him being sent back to Vietnam, "The Land of
Bad Things".
There he is partnered with Swagger, already a legendary sniper. Everyone,
even the generals, knows by now that the war is lost, but Donny and Bob take a
professional pride in their deadly and dangerous work.
About half way through the novel, we're brought back to the present day -
and the master killer who has invaded Swagger's world.
In other words, there are several different books contained in this one
novel. A political thriller, a war story, a hero's-family-in-peril suspenser,
a clues-from-the-past mystery (who is the sniper, who is his target, and
why?), and finally a wrapper-upper of loose ends in the form of a rather
disappointingly standard espionage puzzle - who is the post-Soviet mole in the
CIA?
It's too much for one volume; towards the end, the structure begins to
overshadow the action, and the plot contains a few clichés and irritating
credibility gaps. But for most of these 460-odd pages, I was carried along
happily by fascinating characters, and by some truly marvellous writing. Take
my tip: if you don't know Hunter's work, you should do.
