The Global War on Morris by Steve Israel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Picked this up at the library because I liked the title and the inside jacket description was intriguing. And at first the book delivered. A sort of funny main character, dripping in stereotypes. More caricatures in subsequent chapters, those evil republicans that ran the US government during Bush II. Lots of fun Government Acronym Salad (GAS), lots of fun idiosyncratic GAS bureaucracy.
But that was it. Nothing bloomed in this fertile soil. The stereotypes stayed stereotypes, and the so-called climax came half-way through the book. This comedy of errors ended up being nothing more than a parody of itself. And a boring one at that.
And since the climax came half-way through the novel, the ending was drawn-out and tedious. And fell flat. Maybe the difficulty for the writer was that he was trying to base this on too much reality, and just as the Bush II era kinda fell flat and ended lamely, so too the book. Too many punches pulled, too many opportunities skipped over.
In my opinion, this was a novel that tried to excoriate but also poke fun, and you really can’t do both at the same time. Not if you want to stay historically accurate. Novels require larger-than-life characters or plots, or at the very least, larger-than-life themes. The Global War on Morris has none of these.
It has an old man who makes only a few mistakes, that aren’t really mistakes, and an actual malefactor who goes entirely unpunished. Only in writing this, in a review does such a juxtaposition warrant analysis; in the novel itself, these factors are minutiae lost in the details of the aforementioned GAS.
I guess we were supposed to marvel at a conservative-built computer AI that made all of the decisions leading to our reluctant protagonist’s suffering. If this is supposed to be a symbol of Red State Paranoia, it was meagerly applied. RSP would have everyone flagged as a potential threat to our nation, and I found myself not really caring what happened to anybody in this novel.
Except that actual malefactor I mentioned, and as I said, nothing happened to him. I finished the book dissatisfied.