Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Alexander’s Rubicon

Here at PB.com, we sometimes suffer so you don’t have to. Case in point: The mails recently brought an ARC of Lawrence Alexander’s forthcoming novel Rubicon. The publisher’s blurb tells us:

Bobby Hart, an idealistic young senator from California, thinks that he’s escaped the political spotlight when he decides not to run for president. Then, on a secret mission to Germany, he discovers that there is going to be an assassination. He doesn’t know who is the target, who is behind the plan, or where it will take place. All he knows is that it will happen before the election. And that it operates under the code name Rubicon.

Rubicon, Hart remembers, is the river Caesar crossed with his army when he decided to seize power in Rome. For Caesar it meant that there was no turning back for a republic on its way to becoming an empire. But crossing the Rubicon meant the beginning of an era in Rome. Could it mean the end of something else today?

As events pile up before the predicted attack, it becomes clear that Rubicon isn’t just about the election. It’s a plot to steal the country. Now Hart is in a race against time to find out who is behind the conspiracy and how to stop it before it’s too late and democracy in America is changed forever.

A blistering indictment of our current political climate, Rubicon is an intelligent, action-packed thriller that will change the way readers think about the next election.

What the blurb doesn’t tell you is that this isn’t so much a novel as it is a pastiche of left-wing. nut-job conspiracy theories that might easily have been ripped from Daily Kos diary pages.

Put another way, Rubicon is a thinly fictionalized version of Bush Derangement Syndrome wish fulfillment, the gist of which is that an unnamed vice president (obviously Cheney from the descriptions) creates an intelligence network to provide data supporting whatever the Administration wants and then hatches a plot to maintain the unnamed president (equally obviously Bush) in office indefinitely.

Even my more liberal readers probably won’t like it. There’s zero suspense, as you can figure out where the plot’s going (in broad scope) by the end of the second chapter. The writing and plotting are subordinated to making every possible political point in the left’s indictment of President Bush. As Publisher’s Weekly opines:

Alexander’s mildly entertaining debut, a political thriller, gets off to a fast start, but suffers from imagination fatigue as it settles into a predictable course. ... Blatant similarities between the book’s Republican administration and the current Bush administration may irk even hardcore Democrats, while a subplot involving Hart’s emotionally fragile wife back in California verges on the silly. The story limps to the finish with a tedious courtroom scene.

Other than being wrong about the book being “mildly entertaining,” that review strikes me as just about right.

In sum, don’t waste your money. But if you must, at least buy the book via my Amazon widget. It would be small recompense for having waded through this silliness on your behalf.

PS: The author’s bio says Alexander is a former Senate aide. A few minutes with Google failed to turn up the identity of the Senator for whom he worked. Anybody out there no?