I recently had the opportunity to read Chris Pavone’s The Travelers, a spy thriller and a great example for anyone living on the edge of morality not sure if their actions can or will have consequences.
Will Rhodes is living on the edge and makes a costly mistake after making every attempt, well, a fair attempt, to keep from being persuaded to do something he should not. It is succumbing to that temptation that gives this story it’s thrust. The bad guys trick him and then begin to make him do their bidding, or else what he did will get out.
Mix on top of that the questionable operations of his employer and you have a four-hundred page thriller that leaps from one continent to another with guns, knives and bad guys a step ahead or behind, depending on where in the story one is.
Largely this is a page turner that hangs its hat on a couple of basic principles—obviously the one noted above—what can happen if you’re unfaithful to your spouse in a world of spies when your wife is a spy and you don’t know it—but the application is there for all regardless.
Pavone also explores the essence of society on page 208:
“Everyone is acting all the time. Smiling and laughing, great to meet you, that’s awesome. Wearing this and not that, keeping quiet when you want to scream, saying things you know aren’t true. You do it every day … and you did it before you ever met me. We all dot. That’s what keeps society going. That’s what life is. Acting.”
“Organizations are like organisms. They have deeply ingrained survival instincts. Which isn’t surprising, is it? After all, organizations are made up of people, and people are motivated by self-interest. We’re all self-preservationists. First and foremost, what people want is what’s best for themselves. We want to survive, we want to flourish. We get jobs, then we develop loyalty to our employers, and our loyalty helps our employers achieve success, which in turn help people survive. It’s a symbiotic relationship.”
“The vast majority of espionage is committed for a very simple reason: money.”
The book obviously has some darker perspectives on humans in general, and that’s what helps supply the gasoline for the fire this book burns.
I don’t regularly read thrillers like this because I normally read books that seem to have more to say, but I read the book in the matter of a few days and am glad I did. If you’re headed to the beach in the next few months and need something that will keep you company in the sand, this is a great book to take with you.
ABOUT THE TRAVELERS
A pulse-racing international thriller from the New York Timesbestselling author of The Expats and The Accident
It’s 3:00am. Do you know where your husband is?
Meet Will Rhodes: travel writer, recently married, barely solvent, his idealism rapidly giving way to disillusionment and the worry that he’s living the wrong life. Then one night, on assignment for the award-winning Travelers magazine in the wine region of Argentina, a beautiful woman makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Soon Will’s bad choices—and dark secrets—take him across Europe, from a chateau in Bordeaux to a midnight raid on a Paris mansion, from a dive bar in Dublin to a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean and an isolated cabin perched on the rugged cliffs of Iceland. As he’s drawn further into a tangled web of international intrigue, it becomes clear that nothing about Will Rhodes was ever ordinary, that the network of deception ensnaring him is part of an immense and deadly conspiracy with terrifying global implications—and that the people closest to him may pose the greatest threat of all.
That was one of that sun-ray shining only on you during dark, dank, cloudy day moments. My mirror moment in my present draft of The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club is heavy, but with the aid of Mr. Maass’ study suggestions, it’s about to become a whole lot more intense.
Example from my WIP, The Voodoo Hill Explorer Club.
Case in point: Kirk Carson, 14, has worked with his three closest friends all summer to build the treehouse of his dreams in the woods off KI Sawyer AFB, (Upper Peninsula of Michigan), in 1977, largely in an effort to forget about his first true love, Rose Maxwell, dumping him for the base bully, Billy Banks, the son of the Wing Commander.
While in the woods, the boys are met with a series of triumphs and setbacks, natural, self-inflicted, and mysterious–Lewis Luntz keeps saying it’s the Chippewa Haints who still roam the woods of Hiawatha–but what they don’t know is it’s a Soviet spy hiding out in the woods tracking the number of B-52s armed with nuclear weapons and by being in the woods off base, the boys have encroached on his hideout.
The way it turns out, the spy has made it look like the boys will be safer under the leadership of Billy Banks and they vote to remove Kirk, and he feels their act is the ultimate betrayal.
Now to apply The Emotional Craft of Fiction to my WIP.
I have all that in decent shape in my MSS, but what I now need to do is the exercises in Maass’ The Emotional Craft of Fiction, to help my readers feel the utter agony and humiliation Kirk feels as he learns the other three have already made the decision, have invited Billy–and Rose–to their “secret” fort in the woods and everything he has worked for and dreamed of, has been ripped away from him like a scab.
Did I mention that the day before, Kirk was also humiliated by Billy Banks–coaxed into jumping off the Devil’s Ledge at Chimney Rock, a sixty-five-foot plunge to a Little Laughing Whitefish Falls Lagoon liquid enema?
Kirk has had two bad days back to back and so now it’s time to do some of the exercises Maass has on page 99.
“Is your protagonist lost or seeing a way forward?”
“What does it feel like to be suspended, lifted out of time, in a moment of pure being?”
I’m ready to write those answers.
The Emotional Craft of Fiction is a FANTASTIC read for anyone in the throws of writing any revision of their WIP.
I’ve had a dustup with some dude on Twitter the past few hours who is all bent up about marked/unmarked linguistics.
Pet Peeve: Using BOTH when you can simply write ‘1 and 2’.
Both 1 and 2 = Both Both. It’s like saying something is ‘a tiny, little house.’
You see I tried to respectfully convey to Mr. Maass that for me, he overuses the word BOTH when he links two items together with the conjunction AND.
In my copy of the book, I simply began marking them out–there are that many.
One of my peeves.
There’s nothing wrong with the use of the word BOTH, but it becomes a visual stop sign with repeated use and many writers on my Heather Sellers-inspired 101 book list do it, too.
The Emotional Craft of Fiction offers great insights and tips for writers of any stripe.
Other than that, I love Mr. Maass’ insight and his devotion to helping writers like myself learn more about the craft of fiction writing.
This is a very good book.
I think, for where I am right now, the most important of the three Maass has written and it could not have come along for me at a better time.
Thank you, Donald Maass.
I’m looking forward to what you do next.
Oh, and by the way, Suzanne said yesterday she was jumping over to Amazon to order her own copy.
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