Aliens in the Beltway

I first became acquainted with Christopher Buckley when an excerpt from his Florence in Arabia was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and I thought it was hilarious. It has taken me a while to get around to reading one of his complete books, and I have to say I'm a little bit disappointed.

Little Green Men begins with a funny enough premise; a secret organization within the US government, dubbed MJ-12, has been faking UFO sightings and abducting Iowa farmers as a way to keep up public support for the space program and the military while persuading the Russians that we had access to extraordinary alien technology. One bored member of MJ-12, Nathan Scrubbs by name, decides to order an abduction of John Oliver Banion, the most prominent political TV commentator in the country.

Banion begins to use his show and his column and all his clout and connections to discuss "alien issues." The Washington establishment and all of respectable society immediately subjects him to shun and ridicule; but three million regular citizens begin to treat him as some kind of Messiah. He sets out to force the government to reveal the truth about aliens with the help of his UFO brain trust, consisting of Roz, the attractive editor of Cosmos-politan, an astronomer named Dr. Falopian, and former Air Force Colonel Murfletit. Meanwhile, Scrubbs is on the run from his government employers, who are not to happy with him for abducting someone with such a high profile.

The results are funny but never quite side-splitting. Many of the jokes have to do with fashionable Beltway society and how this society intersects with politics, and those jokes were lost on me. Dr. Falopian and Col. Murfletit have a lot of comic potential as characters, but this potential is never really developed; in fact, both of them can be summarized by the phrase "crazy UFO nuts." That's only funny for about five pages.

Little Green Men also suffers from a distracting lack of polish. On a couple occasions the author refers to a character by another character's name, and he also has a tendency to confuse real people with their fictional stand-ins. One gets the feeling Buckley wrote his book with real politicians (Henry Kissinger, for example) in mind and then went through with an imperfect search-and-replace in order to avoid lawsuits.

Perhaps the funniest part of this book is the inside front cover, where, under the heading "Also by Christopher Buckley" we find the entry "Moby Dick (with Herman Melville)". Now that I've told you that, there's no need to buy it.

Brother Cadfael

Recently finished two books in the Brother Cadfael mystery series by Ellis Peters (real name Edith Pargetter). I read #5, The Leper of St. Giles, and #7, The Sanctuary Sparrow. Both are fun murder-mystery page-turners set in 12th-century England (Brother Cadfael is a monk in a Benedictine monastery in western England).

I won't recap the plots of either book, but reading them made me think about mysteries and how hard it is to craft them. There are only a few named characters in each book, and one of those characters turns out to be the murderer in each case. I actually figured out who the murderer was in #7. Which points to a dilemma murder mystery writers must have: If you make the murderer plausible and provide real clues, it's more likely your reader will figure it out. Whereas if you hide clues and have the murderer be a character from the fringes, that's kind of cheating.

Which is why I don't think I'll ever try a murder mystery. Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dorothy Sayers--and Ellis Peters--are safe.

Oh, one more thing: Nerzhin, we're not offended that you have started your own blog. We are, however, deeply offended that you don't even have a link to this blog on your page. For shame!