When the world turned to pulp

Entirely by coincidence, I happened to revisit a favourite film, Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the night before I began reading Humphrey Hawksley's latest 'future history' novel.

Kubrick had started shooting his movie "" about the events that precipitate a nuclear holocaust during the Cold War "" from a straight script before realising the premise was too horrifying for it to be treated as anything other than a black comedy.

If only Hawksley had taken the same approach. Instead, he wrote a dead serious pulp thriller about the world's nations blowing each other to little bits. The result: World War III is as funny in places as Kubrick's doomsday satire, minus any of the comic intent.

To be fair, if you're among those who believe there is place in popular entertainment for a straight-faced treatment of nuclear war, you'll probably appreciate Hawksley's thriller. After all, words like 'page-turner', that most dreaded of book reviewing cliches (not that we'll stop using it), were coined for this novel.

Short sample: on page 1, the Indian prime minister's daughter is chit-chatting on the phone with the US president's daughter. By page 5 the first terrorist attack has commenced and on page 11 a suicide plane crashes into the Indian Parliament, sending 476 MPs to that great legislative assembly in the sky.

Page 19, the Pakistani president is assassinated and six flips later a North Korean missile attacks a US air base in Japan. This is a 514-page book. You just know the payoff is going to be earth-shattering.

At breakneck speed (another cliche), Hawksley's book zips back and forth across the globe to chronicle the political and military shenanigans of at least eight countries.

The story takes place a few years from now (there are references to 'the Vladimir Putin era' and such) and the protagonists are fictitious, bearing little resemblance to our current leaders. (It could be argued they bear little resemblance to anyone who lives outside the soap opera world, but that's another matter.)

There's the aged British PM who says, "I love Brunei's impenetrable humidity, its jellyfish and its billionaire sultan." There's the US president, the unsubtly named Jim West, whose national security advisor also happens to be his best friend. (They double-dated their future wives in college. Aw shucks.) And there are many others.

Unrecognisable though these people are, not much has changed in the political equations between the countries they lead. Soon, the takeover of power by Bad Men in Pakistan and North Korea becomes the catalyst for worldwide disaster. The first nuking naturally sets off a chain reaction, with each country looking to protect its own interests... by blowing the world up.

Given the litany of leaders to pick from, Hawksley's choice of Indian PM Vasant Mehta as the book's moral centre is telling. There are definite pro-India leanings here; the narrative defines Pakistan in the same terms as we do, and at the story's end India is the least devastated country (which basically means it hasn't been nuked completely out of existence).

Love for India may follow from the author's apparent fascination for Bollywood movies; very early on, we are told the parents of the Indian PM and the Pakistani president played together as children (before the mela of Partition separated them, one supposes).

Not long after this, the PM's daughter rips her shirt off to bandage a dying man's wounds. And Mehta himself is apparently indestructible, like some of the characters in those Bollywood flicks.

Being a well-travelled BBC correspondent, Hawksley naturally has a feel of the political pulse in many countries, and he uses this to his advantage. But the book trips over itself in its many attempts to present the horrors of a time when "nuclear weapons stopped being a deterrent and became merely another weapon of war".

This is because his characters are rarely more than caricatures; beyond a point you stop trying to muster concern for them and instead eagerly look forward to the next nuclear attack. The last few chapters are the equivalent of a morbid video game.

Inevitably, there's plenty of sermonising, and occasionally Hawksley even manages to convey a sense of the insanity of a world headed for mutually assured destruction.

But the book's pulp framework conflicts with, and eventually overpowers its lofty intentions. It's hard to take any of it seriously when you run into idiotic passages like this one, where the US president gets a free crash course in human psychology from his daughter:

"You know why people hate us? It's because we offer this great brand name, and when things get difficult we turn around and say 'Yeah, but you didn't read the small print.' They don't hate us because we're rich. They hate us because we don't tell them the rules, and we don't tell them because there aren't any ..."

(She then moves on to an analogy involving HSBC, Citibank and farmers in Argentina and Nigeria, but by then yo're flipping forward to see who gets bombed next, Tokyo or Pyongyang.)

And here's our first encounter with the Indian PM after Delhi has been nuked: "The food (in the underground bunker) was becoming inedible and Vasant Mehta ...was feeling helpless and depressed." Deep.

You get the picture. Much like the terrorist plane that takes out the Indian Parliament in the opening chapter, this book moves fast and you can't tear your eyes away from it; but like the plane, it self-destructs.

THE THIRD WORLD WAR

Humphrey Hawksley

Pan Books

Pages: 514

Price: £ 6.99