Picture yourself staring into a shop window decorated with jigsaw puzzles. Your eyes pick out the one that has the most number of elements converging into one alluring picture. Soon after, it is spread on your dining table, ripped open enthusiastically, pieces tumbling out like cereal from a box of Cheerios, waiting to be devoured.
You get to it ravenously, impatient to piece it together, a curious hunger burning within you. Slowly, as the hours go by and you are still wondering where you’re, a certain sense of ennui sets in and you push it away for the day. It consumes you no longer, yet you can’t wait to get back to it the next day.
This is Sam Bourne’s latest book, The Chosen One.
The prologue titillates and tickles. You drool over those first four pages bracing yourself for a racy read. It has all the elements you desire — lust, intrigue, murder and mystery. An undeniable winner.
The backdrop: The US Administration with a new charismatic leader at its helm.
The protagonist: Maggie Costello, feisty, fiery yet real. An idealist to boot, she staunchly stands by the leader she believes in — the President of the United States, an affable and charming Stephen Baker. As his political advisor and erstwhile member of the National Defence Security, she is indefatigable and courageous, sometimes foolishly so, with a peculiar vulnerability that endears her to the reader.
The antagonist: Vic Forbes, who is determined to destroy Baker. But wait, he gets bumped off by the real antagonists, faceless, fearless, omnipotent and omniscient opening a Pandora’s Box as he dangles by a silk stocking dressed in drag.
While the Baker Administration skids on thin ice within two months of being in office, faithful Maggie goes careening off, trans-continent, a one-woman army, facing an invisible, invincible and sinister enemy with impunity, almost gets killed in the bargain while the US intelligence headed by the President, no less, has absolutely no clue where she is and what she’s at.
A born again Mata Hari, rising from her own ashes, she chases her malefactors despite grievous injuries, leaving people she’s been in contact with, dead in her wake, undaunted and undeterred. Sometimes the narrative reads like a Hindi movie script.
The book shuffles from one piece in the jigsaw to the next, from one continent to the next, from one state to the next within minutes. It is like watching a mixed doubles match at Wimbledon. Engrossing yet hugely distracting.
Just as you get into the skin of one character and start to live the moment, it sheds its skin like a rattlesnake and dons another. Or worse, goes into flashback mode just as you start enjoying living in the “now”. It is only towards the end, like any good jigsaw, the pieces come together as a whole. Somehow, by then it is an anti-climax. The adrenaline rush has long since abated.
Having said that, The Chosen One does what it aims to do. It exposes the sleazy underbelly of politics and the puppeteering of the most important man in the world. After all, the author, an award-winning journalist, Jonathan Freeland aka Sam Bourne (his pseudonym) has covered five presidential elections including Obama’s campaign in 2008. The man certainly knows what he’s talking about, which is even more alarming.
In a nutshell, it is not a must-read neither is it unputdownable, and the comparison it has drawn to Dan Brown, by its readers, is odious. But it is certainly a story one would like to listen to.
Poonam Bhagat is a well-known designer and an avid reader