I’ve just finished a book by the ex SAS man, Andy McNab – he of the ‘caught in Iraq and had to crawl 2000 miles through the desert, whilst being mercilessly tortured, to escape’ fame. His first book was ‘Bravo Two Zero’ which I vaguely recall reading, and I vaguely remember it was quite a gripping tale, probably because it was true (well, I’m sure he used a bit of poetic licence on a few occasions).
The book I read recently was titled ‘Liberation Day’ and was the story of some sort of US Secret Agent who worked outside the normal agencies (CIA, FBI etc) and who was tasked with killing off or capturing the people responsible for getting money to the Taliban and other terrorist organizations. The story started in North Africa, moved to the US which was where he thought he was retiring to, but then moved to the South of France for his one last job.
Now the point of this blog posting isn’t to do a critique of the novel but to point out that when you’re reading a book and virtually every page you read is set in your own back yard, it’s a bit weird. For reasons I give below, I think I’ll give books featuring the Côte d’Azur a miss from now on.
I’ve often wondered how novelists do their research but it’s obvious that McNab spent some time down here – only by being on the ground could he possibly have known the details he did about Nice, Monte Carlo, Antibes and Cannes. I checked his website to try and establish if he has a place down here but it didn’t say. The fact that McNab never shows his face in public (see picture above) meant that I was unlikely to find out much detail about his holiday home, if that’s what he’s got. Anyway, the level of detail he went into was incredible and was far too much for my liking – the plot could have done with beefing up at the expense of the minutiae which he continually dragged the poor reader through but at least if I ever want to spy on somebody or follow them, well I know exactly how to do it, right down to how you do the toilet on a 24 hour surveillance job!
But back to reading about your own locale – I found myself mentally transporting myself to his locations to try and work out if they were accurate or whether he’d merely looked up Google Earth and Google Street View which I suppose he could have done. But generally, they were spot on so I reckon he just spent a couple of weeks driving up and down the Côte d’Azur noting down details for his novel and lunching in the cafés and bars which formed part of the rather thin plot.
It was all a bit distracting. When I should have been digesting the facts about how money moves about the Muslim world and how it eventually reaches the Taliban, I was trying to think if the arch in Antibes is actually 12 feet thick as he said it was!
Now a bit of a jump here – McNab is obviously a supporter of the British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and his website links to another website, which is basically a blog written by troops in these warzones. On some of the postings there are videos taken by the troops as they go into battle and the one I stumbled across, quite by accident, has a rather shocking scene in it where ground troops are fighting the Taliban at quite close quarters. As they advance they come across a couple of the bearded ninjas in a ditch and simply shoot them!
Good or bad – it’s up to you to decide. Let me have your comments. The URL to the video is below (you don’t see any gory bits).
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