Review of Flashback by Dan Simmons

Prior to reading the novel, I cam across several reviews of Dan Simmons’ 2011 novel Flashback.  I was struck by the number of times I came across the sentiment “good book, except for Simmons’ heavy right-wing views.”  A lot of genre readers these days overly sensitive to the idea of what constitutes an "extreme conservative view".  The repeated commentary added intrigue to what the back cover synopsis promised to be a burning thriller.  (After all, don’t weapons floating freely in society go hand in hand with action plots?  How can it be so strange?)  Having now finished the novel, I’m able to comment myself.  Is Simmons’ view an extreme right wing one?  Cough, cough...

Nick Bottom lives in a flashback haze.  The drug allows him to recollect complete memories of times with his now-dead wife, which he does regularly.  He scrapes by on random private eye money, living in a cubbyhole in what was once a Denver shopping mall.  European and North American political weaknesses have allowed the Middle East to take power in the aftermath of nuclear war.  Most of the western world is now controlled by a Grand Caliphate.  Japan has reverted to feudalism - the land of the rising sun now controls the majority of what is not in the Caliphate’s hands.  Things haze on until one day, the leader of one of Japan's largest, most influential corporations calls Bottom to his office.  His son’s murder still unsolved, he hopes that Bottom, who was part of the original investigation, will be able to use flashback to relive the investigation and turn up clues that may have been missed.  With promise of all the drugs he wants, Bottom accepts.  It’s going back through the crime scene, however, that he gets a big surprise: peeking over the hood of a car is his wife.  Further revelations coming quickly thereafter, Bottom is dragged in to global conflict simmering below the surface. 

In Flashback, Simmons takes what he learned from the three Joe Kurtz contemporary crime novels he wrote and added a near-future backdrop.  The novel expands the criminal element from mafia-level to global, and adds corporate conspiracy.  Bottom inhales his demons, but the overall effect on his life is the same self-destructive PI detached from society we see in Joe Kurtz.  This includes not only Bottom’s present-state existence, but also his family.  Having shipped his son off to live with grandpa while he perpetually turns memory’s dial back to the moments he most cherishes, Bottom makes for both a classic Chandler-esque and contemporary anti-hero.

A tool rather than a concept, however, Simmons does not deploy flashback in as complex a manner as it could have been.  To put it another way, Simmons does not channel Proust.  Flashback is a straight-ahead action thriller.  The pace of the novel is kept fast, the reveal of key plot elements appropriate to mode (i.e. Simmons does a good job keeping the reader guessing all the way to the end), and there are relevant scenes of sensationalism, from satellite weaponry to street riots, desert commando shootouts to terrorist attacks.  Simmons even finds time to pay tribute to Mad Max and A Clockwork Orange.

Now, to politics and potential reasons behind the novel's commentary on the net.  The Obama administration, Canadian parliament, and European governments are laid to blame for acting as doormats to Middle Eastern and Japanese empire building.  In other words, it’s easy to see how some readers might think Flashback is a vehicle for right-wing propaganda.   But it remains ambiguous.  Certainly, Simmons’ political views could be on full display: there is evidence to support the claim, from truck driver tirades to the impetus for the setting.  For me, this is a dystopian thriller, i.e. entertaining sensationalism that wields its concepts to build the story's backdrop—to take advantage of existing media currents to present a paranoid scenario of how things might turn out.  After all, such extensions of reality are some of the things readers look to writers for.  Just because the setting is right wing doesn’t by default equate to Simmons’ political views being in parallel.  In fact, guns are ubiquitous in the novel, but they do not make the novel’s world a safer place.  In fact, Bottom’s son seems particularly negatively affected by the politics of the setting.  And if the novel’s conclusion is taken as sentiment, then the ideas being fought against certainly do not orient towards draconian conservatism.  Believe what you will, but for this reviewer the politics are there only if you want them to be there.  Otherwise, this wants to keep you up at night, turning pages.

In the end, Flashback is a novel with ties to numerous other novels given its post-state/catastrophe setting—flashes (no pun intended) of McCarthy’s The Road, David Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn, Richard Morgan’s Market Forces, Ken Macleod’s The Execution Channel visible.  But Flashback distinguishes itself for the manner in which it realizes a paranoid view to American foreign policy - the worst case scenario.  Whether the reader interprets the politics as Simmons’ own is their choice, as regardless, what is presented is a scary vision of a US where drugs and guns run rampant, and normal, quiet life is anything but certain.  Plot quite standard for a political thriller/mystery, Simmons’ loosely ties story to theme, and seems more intent on writing a bestseller than examining any ideas associated with the mnemonic recall of memory and the effect it might have on people.