STEPHEN HUNTER'S 47TH SAMURAI: A Forgotten Friday Entry

The 47th Samurai is not the first time Stephen Hunter has paid homage to movies; the Earl Swagger novel Pale Horse Coming referred explicitly to The Magnificent Seven (and to Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes). This should not be surprising, since Hunter is also a film critic who has championed the action/adventure movie, but unfortunately this tale of a sixty-year old Bob Lee Swagger embarking on a quest for revenge in Japan has to be taken with a huge amount of tongue in cheek. Hunter signals this when he's listing samurai movies – it's as if he's giving you Quentin Tarantino's young adulthood to follow, and though he isn't into the wholesale exaggeration that QT built his Kill Bill films on, Hunter still has a few problems to overcome.

The main ones concern Bob Lee, first because part of the story requires him to remain relatively anonymous in Tokyo, which is not an easy thing for any gaijin, and the other because Bob Lee's samurai training is of necessity too short, a fact about which everyone in the story reminds us, but being aware is not the same as being convinced.

The real problem is that Hunter attempts to encourage the suspension of disbelief by using facts—constantly giving the Japanese terms for weapons, fighting moves, techniques and parts. I noted in my review of I Sniper (2009--you can link to that here) that Hunter's writing was becoming more 'device-centric', and that as a result Swagger himself was turning into a plot device, rather than a character. This book was published the year before that one, but you can see it moving in that direction. In truth, however, when you look at Hunter's pre-Swagger work, you can see that it is the action thriller that interests him, and perhaps the historical emphasis was a detour.

That's dangerous because the strong points of the Swagger series (both father and son) have been personal as well as historical. Point Of Impact, which introduced Bob the Nailer, was conspiracy-based and began filling in Bob's personality; Black Light, the second novel, in which Bob investigates his father's death and White Springs, the first Earl novel, are perhaps his best books, and their core is character crossing corruption. There's some of that here; the sequences on Iwo Jima are particularly strong, if a bit reminiscent of Clint Eastwood's films, and of course the parallels of the Swagger men as American samurai is not subtle, but it is effective. So too is the relationship between Earl and his Japanese adversary during the war, and between Bob Lee and that man's son afterwards.

So, in the end, the question is whether you smile when Bob Lee assembles his own 47 samurai (the tale of the 47 ronin being the classic Japanese samurai story) or whether you feel it's all too contrived. As usual, Hunter's combat scenes always convince, and when he brings a twist or two into the plot it's never telegraphed, even if Bob Lee always saw it coming. It's got more meat than, say, I Sniper, and it flows along—the only question is how much you want to surrender to the ride.

The 47th Samurai by Stephen Hunter
Arrow Books 2008, £6.99 ISBN 9780099519232

I, SNIPER: STEPHEN HUNTER

Stephen Hunter's history of the Swagger family has, over the years, been engrossing. It was a Hunter novel Bill Clinton was carrying when he stepped down from Air Force One on a visit to Britain; it appeared in newspaper photos, and because John Coldstream remembered my offering a review of the book to him I wound up reviewing it for the Telegraph; the Times, meanwhile, to whom I'd forwarded the offer in the meantime, and who had put the photo on the front page, declined to even discuss Hunter's new noteworthiness.

The series was at its best when it was involved with historical facts, which was more when it starred Bob Lee's father Earl; things like the corruption in Cold Springs, Arkansas, or mob-controlled Havana in 1953 (I always thought the Swaggers and the JFK/MLK hits were a good match, but the timings just never worked out!) and it has always benefitted from the aptly-named Hunter's interest in guns and sniper lore. There is a fine line between interest and obsession, however, and although I Sniper is admirable in the way it integrates the minutiae of armament apparatus into its plot devices, it never seems to allow for the idea of a reader whose own interest may be slightly less technical.

The title itself is interesting. It refers, obviously, to Swagger himself, who is simply the best at what he does, even if he's been content to do it in obscurity. When a more-reknowned sniper goes off on what appears to be a deranged attack on 1960s war protestors, Swagger is called in by your friendly FBI sniper turned special agent, to check his own suspicion that something doesn't feel quite right. The key clue turns out to be a device called I Sniper, a computerised scope which doesn't actually exist, but, according to Hunter is eminently possible. Finally, however, one can't help but think that I, Sniper also refers to Hunter himself, and that Swagger, who in this book is all-seeing, all-knowing, all-American, and always moral, is a wish-fulfillment more than a brilliantly conceived character.

Here he seems much more of a plot device, two-dimensional apart from his macho capability and his devotion to honour. This is something critics of war (in general, in Iraq, in Vietnam, whatever) appear to lack, and that signposts the villainry in the story far too openly to keep it suspenseful. This is a shame, because Hunter's skill at having Swagger anticpate and outthink his rivals remains undaunted; were he to invest Swagger with a bit more depth, as he had in earlier novels, he might have been able to rachet the suspense higher. Less is more in plot sometimes.
What Swagger becomes here is a kind of thinking man's Rambo; meanwhile, the fate of Nick Memphis, the FBI sniper/agent who is set up by the villain is the most suspenseful part of the story. Hunter, once a film reviewer for the Baltimore Sun, seems to take great pleasure in making a Washington Post (the paper to which he moved from the Sun) journo the real villain of the piece, and the twist that resolves that story is perfectly judged, especially if you are a devotee of the small print of small arms.

I have followed Hunter with great pleasure for many years, but in the end I Sniper is a book for the already converted; it has the feel of a series novel, a plot-driven Ludlum or Clancy maybe, and it's too device-centric by half. Bob Lee doesn't lose his swagger, but it would be nice to have just a small glimpse of the man behind it.