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Guardian
'An impressive tour-de-force of historical, political and criminal skullduggery, a kaleidoscopic collage of conspiracy and betrayal'.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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James Collard and his son Nick are flying from Frankfurt to New York for Christmas in 1988. Collard (in part because of a last-minute work meeting, in part because a strange old man told him not to get on the plane) gets off in London. Later that night he learns that the plane has exploded over Lockerbie. Initially concerned to discover whether his son made the flight, Collard gets dragged into the mystery of who put the bomb on the plane, and whether a legendary old spook called James Jesus Angleton - who died three years before - was somehow involved...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1.0 out of 5 stars
Poor Plotting,
By Little Bat "dreamer" (Distant Shores) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Passenger (Hardcover)
It is such a pity that this book begins well, then ends poorly. There is a distinct moment, just over mid-way in the text, when one feels the story lose pace. It is as if the author could not be bothered persisting. After that, it just gets more and more vague and pretentious. The last chapter does not make sense.
There is still room for a good novel about the Lockerbie conspiracy theories. One good point made, earlier in this novel, is that Lockerbie was a turning point, which began a new age of conflict fought in a new way. Historically, this is true. Lockerbie was the first of these major terrorist incidents for which no one officially claimed credit, while the reactions rippled in all directions, according to a plan which our goverments do not seem to have shared with us. The kindest thing I can say about "The Passenger" is that maybe the author started to tell an important story, and just did not have the daring to go on with it.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Haunted by the presence of James Jesus Angleton,
By
This review is from: The Passenger (Hardcover)
The Times blurb on the cover of The Passenger calls it "The mother of all conspiracy theories" - but it's more like the mother, the father, and the preceding generation of the same. If you like highly complex thrillers that have a metaphysical edge and an ending that throws into question everything that has gone before, then this is your book.
It takes Lockerbie - the real catastrophe - and posits an explanation so strange, so infinitely convoluted that it might just be something resembling the truth. Whatever happened to Flight 103 from Frankfurt to London and on to its plunge from the skies onto an obscure little Scottish town, anyone who knows anything about subsequent events knows that the whole truth is never now likely to emerge (but reading Paul Foot's Private Eye account was more than enough for me to understand that it was certainly nothing to do with Libya (even though Gadaffi officially apologised for the disaster) or the man recently released from his Scottish jail.) But this is fiction. It is December 21, 1988 and a man and his son, are waiting to board the plane. The son, Nick, has been backpacking around Europe and the Middle East, the father, Collard, is a security consultant. Neither of them will get on the plane (or will they?). Who are the group of American men talking in urgent whispers and later exchanging emphatic high-fives? Who is the strained, dishevelled man with the burning eyes who urgently warns Nick and his father not to fly? Collard gets a phone call which means he must delay his flight and as far as he is aware, his son gets on the plane. Then, when he goes to identify the body, he meets Sheehan, a violent and menacing American security official, and the body is not Nick's. What Collard discovers leads him deep into the world of espionage, its past and its future, its political and economic history and the life of James Jesus Angleton himself, head of the CIA's Counter-Intelligence operations. Angleton, an American, went to school in England, and in 1943 was sent back to London where he trained in `spycraft' under Kim Philby, the notorious British double-agent who later defected to the Soviet Union. While working for the CIA Angleton's paranoia was legendary and he never recovered from the defection of his mentor, Philby. However, given that he features heavily in The Passenger, even though he died of lung cancer in 1987, one can only accept that his place in this story has dimensions beyond the physical. That said, this is a better book because of the `haunting' of the narrative by Angleton. As one reads on, a creeping sense of the ground shifting beneath one's feet becomes the primary reaction. This makes The Passenger, with all its game-playing and tendentious explication, an hallucinatory, gripping read.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Disappointing and irritating.,
By
This review is from: The Passenger (Paperback)
I've always found Chris Petit to have an interesting take on things and have enjoyed much of his past work,including his film journalism,his 2 films Radio On and An Unsuitable Job For A Woman,and his first novel The Psalm Killer,but I found this book an absolute duffer.It starts off as a very promising conspiracy thriller,but gradually degenerates with the pointless introduction of the late James Angleton as a central character.The reason his introduction is pointless is because he's already dead and is therefore imaginary.Petit would have done far better to have introduced Angleton's contribution in a more conventional manner,perhaps alternating the events of 1988 with the historical events from Angleton's life and career,rather than having Angleton as a corpse/spirit dreaming about his life and about how it all leads up to the crash and then having Collard (the central character) dreaming about Angleton.
The whole thing is so confused that about 80 pages from the end Petit himself seems to lose patience and merely summarises the rest of the events in a hurried and perfunctory manner completely at odds with the preceeding 400 hundred pages.By the time I got to the last page I felt cheated of my time and suspected strongly that Petit likewise regretted writing the book in the way he had,but had just carried on because he had invested too much time in it not to. The book has its moments,Petit is too good a writer for it not to,and raises some thought provoking points,but they are outweighed by the disasterous structure he adopts.I wouldn't recommend this to anyone except conspiracy nuts and it will definitely make me think more than twice before I buy another book by Mr Petit.
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