Dramatic necessity requires the author to create context which lends a degree of sympathy to those who would murder to advance political ends. In the context created for this novel, I am uncomfortably predisposed to accept the rationalization advanced to justify political murder: the elites in Washington are deaf to the pleas the people and rule by spending the country into ruin. The murderers are ex-servicemen, seals, men whom we on these threads would be predisposed to accept as patriots. Inevitably, the murders spawn reactions involving unintended consequences and even more righteous and more innocent players themselves become murderers.
Of course I am giving this action novel a great deal of license in seeing it as an exploration of what happens to a Republic when the elites become too removed from the interests of the people. More, I am wary of my own reactions to it because of the predispositions I have described.
I do not think that Vince Flynn wrote a good novel from a philosophical point of view, although as a spy vs. spy work it is okay. The problem is that he does not adequately create the context which would justify going outside the democratic system in a representative democracy such as we have to commit crime, even murder, to restore the system to something good. The novel is remarkably timely coming as it does during the excesses of spending by the Obama administration, but it does not establish the requisite degree of criminality in the administration necessary to justify the criminality of revolution or murder.
This is not a novel written by Dostoevsky.
If the tree of liberty is periodically to be watered with the blood of patriots, we must somehow show that the tree is being hacked down by tyrants.
