Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers by James W. Hall Page B

Pennsylvania, and during those long dark hours in the wartime barn, before heading back into a crucial battle, the corporal described to Lyon Burke the agricultural challenges he faced with the soil of his land back home that was not as fertile as he wanted it to be. He wanted the farm to prosper and for it to sustain his children when they came of age.
    The next day, Lyon tells Anne, the soldiers went their separate ways, but Lyon soon came to discover that the young corporal/farmer had been shot down in the hours after they parted. He held the young man’s dog tag in his hand and mused:
    “Last night it had been a man—a man who wasted his last night on earth worrying about fertilizer andsoil. And now his blood would fertilize some foreign soil.”
    He looked at her and suddenly smiled. “And here I am, wasting your time talking about it.”
    Since nearly everyone in this novel is busily seducing nearly everyone else most of the time, it seems natural to assume that Lyon Burke is trying to use his war story to soften Anne’s resistance. A great pickup line: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Nothing like a little carpe diem to get the evening turning in the right direction.
    Lyon Burke would like Ann to interpret the story for its existential meaning: Our lives are so short, our deaths so random and unpredictable, we must not waste time on trivial worries like protecting our virtue.
    But for the corporal, the opposite interpretation holds true. What concerned him in his final moments was something more enduring, more profound, more fundamentally American, than simple existential turmoil.
    In those desperate hours on the edge of the battlefield, the corporal was returning to his own Golden Country, the literal terra firma he loved. He was a man of the soil, a man for whom peach trees were as important as bags of gold. Indeed, the dirt he sifts through his hand gives him a level of reality and integrity that hardly any other single character in this novel possesses.
    The natural world he recollects and returns to briefly in his mind is like Winston’s from
Nineteen Eighty-four
, an escape from war and death and oppression to his own Edenic memory. Lyon Burke had it all wrong. Rather than wasting his last hours, the corporal was invoking his Golden Country with all the solemnity of a final prayer.
    In a novel glutted with the cheap stimulants of cash, fame, drugs, and an endless whirlwind of sexual partners, this single passage stands apart. This corporal occupies only a paragraph or two, yet his brief appearance in the novel resonates like the chime of a well-struck bell through the rest of its pages.
TWO PARADISES
    In
The Hunt for Red October
, the Golden Country is an imaginary far-off destination. Locked away inside a submarine thousands of feet beneath the surface of the sea, Marko Ramius, the Russian commander of the
Red October
, summons a striking image of Eden when he announces to his crew that they are headed for the tropical paradise of Cuba. If they manage to go undetected by the imperialist American dogs, they will soon be lying on the white beaches beneath palm trees and enjoying the comradeship of the local ladies.
    Secretly, Ramius intends to defect to his own version of the Golden Country, the United States of America, but to mislead and motivate his crew, he intentionally invokes the Communist Party’s version of heaven on earth, that exotic island in the Gulf Stream.
    Eventually, Jack Ryan guesses correctly that Ramius’s motivation for defecting is the compelling allure of the United States: “America, Ryan smiled, could be pretty seductive to someone used to the gray life in the Soviet Union.”
    There is little subtlety in Clancy’s novels, but this is an instance of a fundamental irony around which much of the novel’s action and its patriotic stance is built. Simply put, the “gray life” of Soviet society can make even a shabby paradiselike Cuba