Frame-Up in Belize

Gerald Noonan was Associate Professor of English at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and co-editor of A Public and Private Voice.

There is a parallel of sorts between the hero of this unlikely James Bondian saga and its author. The hero opposes, fast and furiously, powerful authorities, and the author opposes the standard authorities on believable fiction with fast and furious plot-summary and a minimum of characterization, motivation, insight, and plausible pace.

Michael Kincaid, the hero, is an American in Ottawa. He discovers CIA dirty tricks against Quebec’s premier; escapes the CIA’s murderous attempts to shut him up (once in a car-rundown at Confederation Square and a second time in a lone-cabin siege in Ontario northwoods); is befriended by Cubans who have their own foment to stir in Quebec; is sent to Belize for Cuba; is double-crossed there and framed for the murder of the long-established Cuban agent (the reason for that Cuban caper is hazy); escapes and is imperilled by sharks, lured by a bleeding wound, in the night waters of the Gulf of Mexico; is cleared by U.S. military; returns to find Julie, the Sicilian girl who helped him back there in the northwoods siege (Julie, who was separately rescued from the CIA by Cubans, was sent to the Red Brigade in Italy and then to Montreal to stir up Italians with an ethnic newspaper). But to continue: returns to find his Julie not in Montreal but in a Maine forest stronghold in the clutches of the CIA turncoat who started it all and who is now revealed as a Soviet double agent; returns in a helicopter (Deus ex machina) to find her in the Maine wilderness fleeing a forest fire as well as the fiery double agent; descends from the whirlybird, kicks the agent into the forest cauldron, lifts the girl to outstretched hands in the hovering helicopter, and then himself is snatched heavenward to safety as the book ends.

The conception of narrative is what’s at fault here, more than the competence of the prose. Too often a character will have a brief reflection, in Toronto let’s say, in the first sentence of a paragraph, discover a counter to it in the next, and in the next and concluding sentence of the same paragraph have spent two subsequent weeks in Sicily.

If both hero and author slowed down and pondered somewhat the nature of existence in after-chase life, the sum total of the prose components and all of the commendable industry might be more enduring. As it is, characters and author leap on, from craggy danger to danger, from toothy shark to forest-fire frypan, literally defying all odds.