Barry Eisler's last novel,
Fault Line, was pretty poor by his standards. Dropping his long standing character, the assassin John Rain, it introduced the Treven brothers; corporate lawyer Alex and special forces soldier Ben. Some solid action was offset by some terrible character work and a hackneyed plot.
'Inside Out', Eisler's new novel, marks the return of Ben Treven, this time without his brother, and is an improvement on Fault Line even if it doesn't get anywhere near the best of the Rain novels. Gone are the histrionics of the Treven family soap-opera that marred Fault Line, replaced by a far more interesting and action orientated plot. That change in focus plays to Eisler's strengths as an author. He was always far better at covert action, espionage and political intrigue than he was at interpersonal relationships and Inside Out has far more of the former and less of the latter than its predecessor.
The plot focuses on the continuing fallout from the US War on Terror during the Bush Presidency, and feels both plausible and current. Its also has enough twists and turns to it to keep you guessing about the eventual outcome and individuals' motivations (although one 'twist' is made far too obvious). Inside Out has been criticised by some readers on Amazon in the US for being too overtly liberal in its outlook and containing too much polemic, but I found the balance to be just about right. I certainly didn't feel that Eisler was constantly hammering me over the head with his political views in the same way that the likes of Vince Flynn have started to do.
Action, when it comes, is up to the usual high standard we would expect of Eisler. Whilst the story unfolds at a rapid pace, the book isn't one long series of action set pieces but there's enough incident along the way to keep the reader's attention.
Despite the improvements over Fault Line however, there are still many problems with Inside Out that prevent it from being anying more that an 'okay' read. The first and most prominent is the character of Ben Treven himself. Frankly the man is an idiot. Less of an idiot than he was in Fault Line admittedly, but still dumb as a bag of hammers and almost childishly naive with it. He also lacks anything approaching charisma or charm, all of which makes it hard to really root for him as the story's hero.
Eisler's handling of interpersonal relationships hasn't greatly improved either. None of the interplay between Ben and Paula, a stereo-typically beautiful FBI agent he encounters during the course of the book, feels remotely believable (in fact it feels like a rehash of Ben's relationship with Sarah Hosseini from Fault Line, right down to the sudden, inexplicable shift from hating each other to having ridiculously graphic sex). The problems aren't restricted to relationships between the sexes either; Ben's interactions with Hort, his mentor and commander, never feel particularly natural, with Hort uncomfortably shoehorned into the role of providing great chunks of exposition to the younger man, and the motivations of Larison, the book's ostensible 'bad guy', are all over the place.
Finally, just to compound the book's other flaws, the resolution to Inside Out makes it feel very much like filler between Fault Line and the John Rain series. On a positive note the denoument does set things up for the return of Rain, Dox, et al, which is to be welcomed, and the book as a whole establishes some potentially interesting plot threads for the future. In terms of providing a satisfying conclusion to a self-contained story however, Inside Out fails abysmally. When I reached the book's very abrupt and open ending I felt cheated, as if I'd been conned into buying an expanded prologue to a far larger and more interesting story to come.
All I can hope is that the iminent return of John Rain will also be accompanied by a return to form by Barry Eisler.
