Robin Cook is a New York doctor. ‘Vector’ was his 21^st medical thriller, and concerns a bio-terrorist threat to his home city. Here we look at his style, and contrast US pulp fiction to high literature. Perhaps in the holidays you might like to read one of the great literary masterpieces I shall recommend, followed by a Robin Cook novel. The comparison is interesting and worthwhile…both approaches to writing have their pros and cons. 

‘Vector’ opens with a ghastly ritualistic murder, described with the same degree of concern the US entertainment industry generally has for the suffering of minor characters. Also, a rare case of haemorrhagic mediastinitis appears for post-mortem.  Our hero Jack, who owns a dog-eared copy of Harrison’s, realises it is due to anthrax. It is not long before the FBI becomes interested and the threads come together…the PAA, or People’s Aryan Army, an ultra-right wing group dedicated to destroying what they perceive as Semitic capitalism, has found a disgruntled Russian ex-bio-weapons technologist driving a yellow cab who wants to join them in a mass murder of rich New Yorkers. 

To think about: Cook’s plot was activated a few years after the book was released. Do you remember the anthrax sent to certain people in Washington DC? Do you think the writer can be held responsible?  

 

Meanwhile a rather dehydrated sort of red herring surfaces...what is the mysterious dinner their friend Laurie wants them to attend? This deeply boring mystery gets two pages of ‘hmmm, gee, I just don’t know’ dialogue early on, and reappears four more times before we find it all nothing much, and finally irrelevant.  

‘…Jack mulled over Laurie’s surprising behaviour. It was so out of character. She was always considerate and concerned about proper etiquette. She would never phone at such an hour without good reason. Jack wondered what that reason was. 

Jack shaved and climbed into the shower while he tried to imagine why Laurie would have called in the middle of the night…’ (p 9) 

Sentences like ‘Jack wondered what that reason was.’ are superfluous, and give the novel an air that is almost childish.  

Here is another example, from p69: ‘She explained to Jack that Jason’s business was wholesale…She also said there were no employees at the warehouse nor at the office. 

“Sounds like a one-man operation,” Jack said. 

“Very much so,” Helen said.’

 

Here the word ‘nor’ is ungrammatical, and is typical of errors that creep into manuscripts when the author writes two or three novels a year, and the publishing industry is too sycophantic to the dollar to bother editing them properly. This is more common practice in the industry than non-writers realise. Publishing is very nepotistic when money becomes involved. Books like Cook’s are printed in large format with expensive glossy covers, whilst the timeless classics of literature are to be found in very modest little books, if at all. So-called ‘International Bestsellers’ are declared so on the basis of domestic sales in the US: the list cannot be trusted. For example, one can rise up the list by buying thousands of your own books, making yourself appear a bestseller. The mindless mechanism of the market, and mechanistic mind of the consumer, does the rest. 

To think about: Poetry is an art-form that has in a way retained its purity by being almost irrelevant economically. Can you think of any others? 

Do you think the Australian industry is safe from these fiscal pressures? 

 

At the end of chapter three, I personally was thinking ‘I know the pattern of this story already, why bother continuing? The dramatic techniques are standard and dull, there is sure to be a car chase, a love interest, and some gun deaths. There are no long words, no concepts, no self-questioning or examination of the human complexities of motive, and no thoughtful sentences to pull one up. The book is designed to flow quickly and end with a brief thrill of the sort that makes the customer want to go out and buy the next Robin Cook. If this were food, it would give you diabetes.’ 

Anyway, the book carries on, with the words ‘Jack said’ so common as to give the impression of an irritating Jack-hammer in the novel’s background. The stupid stick-figure characters of the terrorists are set in an environment which is held to be so obvious that it needs no explanation…Cook for instance thinks we are interested in which streets his cyclist hero rides along: the name of the street is seen as all the information required for a reader to picture it. This is typical of the strange insularity which most large and egotistical metropoli manifest around the world. 

Like a Hollywood script, everything is spelt out for us. The waking from a dream method of going back over past history is used to open two chapters. All the serious characters but one are male, with single syllable names: Jack, Steve, Curt, Chet, and Tom. Only the Russian, Yuri, doesn’t fit the pattern. His slug of vodka works like a theme tune…which is OK, but a sophisticated writer would think of more than one characteristic for a human being.  

The characters (‘“Excuse me!” she called out to Marlene Wilson, the African American receptionist.’) use fragments of conversation which are not believable- for example, when the bad guys are talking about their plot to kill thousands- 

‘Besides, let’s not forget he’s doing us one hell of a favour getting us a bio-weapon.’ 

Similarly, the female lead, another highly educated doctor, is shortly to get married, but it is up to her friends to find out what her fiancee does for a living…she didn’t ask. At the same time, a colleague who works in the same department every day and who is in love with her says she never mentioned to him her forensic speciality was gunshot wounds.

“I’m impressed by you two going to Paris for the weekend. I could never do that in a million years” says Jack.

 

The Canadians have an expression for all this… “Yeah, right.” 

To think about: In a way that is the easy bit. A more intriguing question is why these books, that neither linger in our memory or nourish our inner life, are so very popular.  

Here is what Samuel Coileridge Taylor had to say on the subject in 1809:

'It cannot but be injurious to the human mind never to be called into effort: the habit of receiving pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excitement of curiosity and sensibility, may be justly ranked among the worst effects of habitual novel reading.

…those who confine their reading to such books dwarf their own faculties, and finally reduce their understanding to a deplorable imbecility…

…(But) the obstinate (and toward a contemporary writer, the contemptuous) aversion to all intellectual effort is the mother evil of all which I had proposed to war against, the queen bee in the hive of our errors and misfortunes, both private and national.'

References and Further Reading 

Coleridge S.T (1809) from The Friend; Essay III, Problems of Communication...in Coleridge ed Kathleen Raine; Penguin p145-6

Cook R (1999) Vector   Macmillan 

Cook R…..possibly the most popular of his thrillers was 'Coma'