The Wilt Alternative (Published in 1979) - Terrorism and comedy - Authored by Tom Sharpe

The sequel to Wilt, Tom Sharpe’s second in the series is a continuation of the life and idiosyncrasies that seem to follow Henry Wilt. With satire, which is crude and offensive, Tom Sharpe was quite an acclaimed outspoken novelist. Once you are accustomed to his style of comedy, you might agree with those who feel that Sharpe is one of Britain’s funniest novelists. In the Wilt Series he has put forth a character that he does not seem to like very much himself. Hence, the strange and wrong situations that Henry Wilt, the books protagonist finds himself in often.
In The Wilt Alternative, Henry Wilt is shown to be the Head of the reconstituted Liberal Studies Department at the Fenland College of Arts and Technology. Having assumed power without responsibility, Wilt may no longer be a victim of his own uncontrolled fantasies, but visualizes how he would confront political bigots and bureaucrats.
The nature of his troubles has changed, but he is still faced with inane issues. These issues range from his wife’s over enthusiasm for everything organic and quadruplet daughters who seem to get more horrifying as they grow older, to nostalgia, temporary infatuation with a foreign student and the hostility shown by the medical services that refuse to attend to his most basic needs.
However, these problems seem to pale in comparison, when he becomes the unintentional participant in a terrorist siege. The heap of a house, which Wilt lives in, is all in line with Eva’s alternative organic living lifestyle. But when Eva, rents out the attic flat to a German student, Wilt regrets having laid his eyes on her so late in his life. He moons over her, without realizing that she is a terrorist and that their house is very soon going to become ground zero, when authorities come to try and arrest her.




He is forced to find a way out of this mess, as neither the terrorist nor the authorities know what to do when the Wilt family is caught in the crossfire. Wilt is not only confronted with issues of power, which he must deal with, but also has to resume dialogues with the famous Inspector Flint. In the process he must undergo the indignity of psycho-political profiling and at the same time fight for the liberal values which seem to be threatened by not only international terrorism but also the fancy methods of the police anti-terrorist agents.
Wilt shows great mental ingenuity, which is a result of his innate cowardice, and emerges the hero he is shown to be. Sharpe does a wonderful job to starkly highlight the bitter ironies and social norms present in today’s society. Wilt is shown to have not changed one bit. He still finds women to be horrible terrifying beings. He speaks his mind, even if at times it is just muttering to himself. Through Wilt, Sharpe has depicted albeit unsophisticatedly the absurd irregularities that exist in our societal norms.
While the jokes in the story are at times repeated or absent, and the language used to convey social realities is crude, the book has an absolute ring of authenticity to it. It shows perfectly an era of English history and fashion, which might soon be beyond living memory. Another thing that is truly ingenious about Sharpe’s style of writing is his control over the beat of the plot. As a reader, one keeps waiting for Sharpe to take a bow, after some crazy antic in the story. However, instead of hitting a peak and ending, the story just keeps getting crazier and crazier, making for quite an entertaining read.

Rainbow Six (published in 1998) - Terrorist fighting unit - Authored by Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy was a best selling author who died in the year 2013, dying at the age of 66 years. He has written a number of best-sellers, mostly focusing on military and intelligence matters, writing with a lot of depth and yet making the novel interesting. The main character in his fiction is the conservative, deeply moral and family man Jack Ryan, yet another character who plays a notable role in many of his books is the more mixed character of John Clark. He is more of an action guy, who can kill on behalf of the country, and also where he feels he is in the right and acting as an avenging angel, such as 'Without Remorse' where he feels the impact of a drug-runner's syndicate and takes revenge on those who killed his girl-friend. The net result of all these murders was that he was deemed intelligent enough and skilled enough to become part of the CIA, and all the killing of drug-runners was more in tune with what the US was trying to do.
The problem when dealing with terrorism, especially in a continent such as Europe, is about the borders between different nation-states and no interaction between the different countries and their police forces / specialized units. There are a number of issues that come to the fore when trying to get cooperation between the different nations involved, so the premise of the book is a bit difficult to believe; the book presumes that various countries agreed to contribute personnel to a security force that could go across nations and fight terrorist incidents where they occur (although in an admission of the need to get approval, the (Rainbow Six - the name of the security force) needs to be called in by the nation involved).




Also, the incidents of terrorism that happen nowadays are not the bank robberies or kidnapping in high-profile incidents, but cases of bomb blasts and the like, where you either need a security force to prevent such incidents from happening, or a good investigating agency to go across borders and determine who actually carried out the incidents. However, if you leave these quibbles aside, the book presents the action of the acts of terrorism (including the reaction of this specialized force - Rainbow Six - which is headed by John Clark, he being the one who had proposed the formation of such a force to the President, one assumes that was Jack Ryan).
Tom Clancy was never fond of the environmental movement, and that comes out in several of his books, although this book takes the narrative much further, presenting a plan by some rabid environmentalists to create a bioweapon that would be launched during the Olympics, and would kill of most of the people currently present on earth (a few would remain who would either have natural immunity, or who were given the antidote). When Clark learns about his, what does he do ?

The Sum of all Fears (published in 1991) - Thermo-nuclear blast, authored by Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy was a bestseller author, who wrote with great authority on the military and on intelligence matters. However, even though he wrote expertly and with great detail on the matters that he wrote about, his books were not boring. Imagine a detailed description of how a hydrogen (thermonuclear) bomb works, imagine it written out in a novel, and imagine how scared you can be of the prospect that a physicist, with access to a core of plutonium, and without the support of a nation state, can construct a huge weapon that has the potential to destroy a city and also bring the major powers to war with each other. The detailed description of how a hydrogen bomb, with its fission and fusion steps, almost seems out of a physics book without the technical jargon that would be there in a textbook.
The book is the 5th in the series of books that had Jack Ryan as the character, and here he is in a senior position in the CIA, but unfortunately not on good terms with the National Security Advisor (Liz Elliott) because of some ego issues. Unfortunately for Ryan, this carries a lot of weight, because normally the NSA carries a lot of weight, but in this case, since the NSA is also having an affair with the President, it carries even more importance. By this time, Ryan is also well know within Congress since he was intimately involved with the going-ons in the previous book, Clear and Present Danger, which forced the moving aside of the then President and the coming into the Presidency of the current president, Robert Fowler.
The book starts with a new twist to the Israeli-Palestinian twist, whereby everybody normally knows of the public cycle of rock-throwing and retaliation, which can result in deaths, but don't cause any moral issues on a wide scale. However, the book takes a new tactic by the Palestinians, where they oppose the Israeli army through non-violent means, and are viciously attacked by a slightly deranged Israeli army commander. This sight, on view on TV screens, forces a changeover in the morality, since nobody can defend this action of killing peaceful protesters who were not attacking them. Israel stands on the verge of being isolated, and although this isolation has happened, a change in attitude in the US could be very significant.

A quick plan, started by Jack Ryan, goes through the various stakeholders including the Vatican, the Saudis, the Russians, and a potential peace is declared in the troubled areas of the Middle East, where a troika of different religious leaders administer the region. This causes havoc in the minds of terrorists, since the confrontation is their life blood, and they join forces with a German terrorist who was also finding safe sanctuary missing with the meltdown of the communist worlds of eastern Europe. This would not mean anything, but they have found a lost Israeli bomb in the Golan Heights, and that is seen as the basis for building a powerful bomb, that combined with other actions, will make it seem that this was done by the Russians and provoke a massive confrontation.
With the bomb having been made, it is sought to be exploded in Denver when the Super Bowl is happening, which would devastate the city and also take out senior administration officials who were there to take part in the game. Combine this with an attack supposedly by the Russians in Berlin on American forces, and a weakened and traumatized President, not getting good counsel, and the situation rapidly escalates. The Russians are blamed, and they are shocked to find that they are being blamed, with a battle happening in Berlin and some of their aircraft getting downed without warning near Libya. But if threatened, they have the potential to kill back in equal number. Ryan is getting some good intelligence, but will the President listen in time ? A gripping, although seemingly unrealistic novel.