The Negotiator – Frederick Forsyth, 1989 ★★

A Plot that Got Away

What happens when dark forces buried deep inside the leadership of two superpowers simultaneously plot to take control of the world’s major oil producers? The same thing that happens when an author takes on a story too convoluted and ambitious for his own good: total chaos.

Frederick Forsyth stood atop the world of airplane thrillers back when people still read books on planes. His prior novels topped bestseller lists and won over critics for their clever construction and daunting predicaments. What to do for an encore? How about a story involving the end of Glasnost, invasions of both Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the kidnapping of the President’s son? Does this thing go to 11?

Our story opens in Moscow, the capital of what is still known as the Soviet Union. A senior military official, Soviet Chief of Staff Marshal Kozlov, ponders dark options in the face of what appears to be a dire energy crisis just on the horizon:

If the Soviet Union could take political control of a ready-made source of ample raw crude oil, a piece of territory presently outside her own borders… if she could import in exclusivity that crude oil at a price she could afford, i. e., dictate… and do so before her own oil ran out…

But how to do this when your boss is a guy named Mikhail Gorbachev who doesn’t really want to hear about territorial aggressions when he could instead forge better ties with the West? If you’re Koslov, you figure out a way to work around him.

Similarly, a Texas oilman named Cyrus V. Miller ponders the problem of John Cormack, a liberal Republican President of the United States committed to world peace. Peace cuts into profits, and besides, the Middle East has gotten too uppity. “This nightmare of being at the beck and call of a bunch of goatherds has gone on long enough,” he fumes.

All this sets up a book which promises to be very good or very bad. Surprisingly, it winds up being neither. Forsyth’s mastery of the set-up remained in striking evidence at the end of his first full decade of fiction-writing, but he’s all thumbs at tying up loose ends.

Author Frederick Forsyth sets up a dynamic plot in 1989's The Negotiator, only to lose it in the writing. It would become a frustrating characteristic of his later work. Image from https://alchetron.com/Frederick-Forsyth-546697-W.

Given how effectively Forsyth worked in the past, this surprised and disappointed me when I first read the novel a year after its publication. Today I’ve come to expect it.

The big set-up goes on for close to 100 pages, involving no less than three back-to-back-to-back episodes where some person reads a white paper which Forsyth reproduces in full. I have a feeling Forsyth enjoyed writing these white papers more than the story; they were more fun to read.

The main protagonist, whom we meet having a nightmare in a brief prologue before being formally introduced much later, is our title character, a former Green Beret who like Prince and Madonna goes only by one name, Quinn. Quinn once quarterbacked negotiations with kidnappers, so when President Cormack’s son is kidnapped at Oxford, he’s pulled out of retirement to help out.

“I don’t work for the U. S. government,” Quinn says in setting the terms of his employment. “I have its cooperation in all things, but I work for the parents. Just them.”

This sets up what becomes The Negotiator’s major highlight, a tense cat-and-mouse game where Quinn must operate against adversaries on two fronts, both the kidnappers themselves, who seem preternaturally savvy about their situation; and the authorities, particularly an obnoxious official from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who alternately badgers Quinn and muddles the situation with his own gambits.

Forsyth lays out the situation in smart detail:

Hunting men with a sack of stolen money, or a murder behind them, you just went for the target. In a hostage case the chase had to be very quiet. Spook the kidnappers badly enough, and despite their investment of time and money in the crime, they could still cut and run, leaving a dead hostage behind them.

The hostage negotiations only take up half of the novel; after that we get a chase across Europe replete with the sort of hard-boiled action airplane-thriller readers expected and often got, especially from authors other than the crafty, subtle Forsyth of yore.

The Negotiator’s second half showcases Quinn in James-Bond mode, breaking into buildings and setting up assassination attempts. By his side is another FBI agent, a woman named Sam who offers Quinn both a Watson and a love interest.

And what about those evil Russians and Texans? The kidnapping is part of a scheme to destabilize the American president, which somehow transforms this strong man of peace into a quivering mess. But the central plots of destabilizing countries for their oil wealth is scarcely addressed after the first 100 pages. Instead, the focus is all on Quinn either hunting his prey, or else being hunted in turn.

Before The Negotiator, I find Forsyth’s novels to be almost uniformly terrific explorations into realistic geopolitical skullduggery and spycraft. After, they become more patchy, increasingly soft-headed exercises built around big explosions and talking heads in high places muttering about impending Armageddon. It’s my belief that The Negotiator represents a turn for the negative in Forsyth’s output.

To be fair, Forsyth does accomplish the major mission of any thriller writer: He keeps you reading. He does this with some suspense scenes that sacrifice realism and ask you to accept Quinn as someone who can find his way into random underworlds but can’t figure out how the bad guys keep getting the jump on him. There are fun depictions of out-of-the-way locales, like a seedy part of Antwerp where Quinn and Sam seek one of the kidnappers:

Most of the bars had names like Las Vegas, Hollywood, California, their optimistic owners hoping that names redolent of foreign glamour would entice the wandering sailor to think opulence lay beyond the chipped doors. By and large they were sleazy places, but warm and serving good beer.

A little later, Quinn finds his way to another such locale:

Lest they fall asleep, visitors to Den Bosch are met with a quiz game devised by the town planners. It is called Find a Way to Drive into the Town Center. Win, and the visitor finds Market Square and a parking space. Lose, and a labyrinthine system of one-way streets dumps him back on the ring road.

All this is fun, Forsyth in his accustomed journalist mode with a welcome nod in the direction of Ian Fleming, but by-the-by set dressing for the main event, which is the uncovering of the master plot. The plot never quite gets underway, as Forsyth has trouble developing it and seems to ignore it after a while. The Russians, for example, are totally forgotten except near the end, while the evilest mastermind, an ex-CIA agent working for Miller, stays in the shadows.

They never quite come together, these plot strands. Instead they lie there like limp linguini, awaiting a zero hour that never quite arrives. Quinn parts with Sam and sets to work on a plot to draw the bad guys out, a plot that involves writing not one but two manuscripts detailing their actions. At one point, he pretends to be the evil ex-CIA agent by mimicking his nasal voice on the phone, a device that somehow fools the evil subordinates.

Finally it ends, an ending which pretends to tie up loose ends by identifying a sleeper agent in the White House but feels unsatisfying even by the limited parameters Forsyth establishes. The Negotiator proves in the end a case of biting off more than one can chew, both for the villains and the author.