Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In his latest offering, “Never,” author Ken Follett gives us an 800-page tome portraying the run-up to a possible nuclear war between the US and China. Unfortunately, it’s a not-very-good story filled with implausible or stock characters and lots of lecturing about the downsides of nuclear war. It starts off well enough: a President’s tour of the bunker she’ll use in the event of Armageddon; a CIA undercover operative investigating Chinese and North Korean involvement with Islamic terrorists in Chad. But after that good beginning, “Never” slowly unwinds. Protagonist President Pauline Green is part of the problem. She’s all too ordinary. We see nothing of the drive and ambition it takes to become President. We’re given very little idea of what she wants, either for herself or the country. Indeed, she seems more interested in her love life than the mounting threat of a holocaust. And when she’s not worrying about her unfaithful husband or beginning an affair with her National Security Advisor, she’s engaging in Q and A sessions with her 14-year-old daughter about the horrors of nuclear war—Q and A sessions which lack credibility and which really are no more than thinly veiled information dumps for the author to get his point across. What is his point? That nuclear war is bad. And while Mr. Follett includes a number of fictional high-ranking Chinese and North Korean officials in his story, those characters are all shallowly drawn. I learned very little about Chinese and/or North Korean society or communism or aims or motivations or capabilities. Which is unfortunate because, usually, I come away from a Follett novel believing I've learned something. With "Never" I did not. I can’t say that the book is badly researched because it does include details about the White House and how a president goes about initiating nuclear war, which some may find interesting. But his research seems not to have extended to what drives, or what it means to be, a world leader, either American or Chinese. In the absence of that, Mr. Follett’s newest story falls flat.