I don’t usually read thrillers, and one reason for this is that I’m not familiar with modern-day weaponry. I’m sure that a Heckler & Koch is larger than a Luger, for instance, but that’s the extent of my expertise regarding armanents. And yet I picked up Matthew Reilly’s Temple and did my best to wade through a flotilla of Super Stallions and Rigid Raiders. They sounded like something out of a porn film, and I couldn’t remember the difference(s) between the Apaches, the Hueys and the Mosquitoes. So, why did I start to read the book?
The backstory behind the novel is that a meteorite landed in South America centuries ago; this meteorite contained an extraterrestrial metal called thyrium, which is used in thermonuclear devices. The Incas carved it into an idol, and now copies of a manuscript have pinpointed the location of the thus-far-hidden idol. The action cuts from the present to the past, with a fugitive Inca prince staying two steps ahead of Hernando Pizarro as the conquistadores try to kill him claim the idol. I’m a sucker for underdogs, so I started reading to see if the prince escaped with the idol. Plus, the main character in the modern-day setting is a professor of linguistics, so I thought this might be a shy bookish character with whom I might be able to identify. Little did I know that under his tweed-jacket exterior, this professor was Superman’s love child by Godzilla. But let me start with the least egregious offence of this book, its attempts at
I don’t know how thyrium-261, a metal, can be “petrified” and I wasn’t aware that the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters) were a binary star system, but let’s pass over that and get to the biology. At one point, an ancient Inca temple is opened, and this releases over a dozen huge black cats to kill the people who opened it. These cats are described as being five feet high at the shoulder when they’re standing on all fours. How they survived in the confines of the temple for this long is a mystery. The natives of a tribe in that area drop human bodies down a chute into the temple for the cats to eat, but considering that the temple contains even more cats, including kittens, the natives must have some kind of a breeding program to satisfy them. Either that, or I finally know what happened to Jimmy Hoffa. The cats have a convenient kryptonite in the form of monkey urine, though, and when the idol is dipped into water, it emits a humming sound that further pacifies them. In the end, they just weren’t all that interesting, let alone believable as an undiscovered species of giant black panther.
Good science is always a plus point in a book, but if I couldn’t do without scientific accuracy, I’d be reading Arno Karlen’s Man and Microbes instead. In a novel, I look for other things, such as
Ah, where to start…
Professor William Race. Or “Amazing Race”, as I started to think of him. This man survives killer caimans, killer cats, killer Nazis, killer Americans, killer natives, killer militamen and an ex-girlfriend’s heartless betrayal. He does all this with his Yankees baseball cap perched firmly on his head. He is the wet dream of every fifteen-year-old bookworm who watched the pretty cheerleader go off with the captain of the football team. He is the hero of an ancient native prophecy, and he has a birthmark to prove it. He gets a “seriously cute” girl in the end. He is, in short, insufferably dull and unrealistic.
At first, he seems like an intriguing protagonist. He arrives at the university where he works and is promptly met by soldiers from a subsection of the US Army called DARPA. They need him to translate the manuscript which leads them to the location of the thyrium, because another copy of the manuscript has been stolen by Nazis, and the Nazis are after the idol as well. For some reason, everyone has already built thermonuclear devices called Supernovas and is just waiting for a sample of thyrium to activate them. So off goes Race, and he soon finds out that the team which accompanies him to the Andes includes his ex-girlfriend, a physicist called Lauren.
I’m always pleased to see female characters in positions of responsibility and intelligence, but unfortunately Lauren is only there for one purpose – to pass information to the Republican Army of Texas, which also wants the thyrium, and to cheat on her husband. This unfortunate man just happens to be Race’s brother, a soap-opera fact that goes unrevealed till the end of the novel, by which time larger and more unrealistic coincidences have risen to eclipse this one. Anyway, getting back to the narrative, the DARPA people, plus Race and Lauren, find an abandoned native village and the temple containing cats and idol. It’s during this period that the author makes a second attempt at characterization, picking a hapless young Green Beret called Douglas “Doogie” Kennedy as a victim.
Normally I feel immediate sympathy for people who have been abused as children, especially if they overcome their upbringing and make something better out of their lives. I admire such people, and I wish I could have admired Doogie. Unfortunately, the author makes a detour into Exposition City and emerges with the information that, “throughout his school years in Little Rock, Arkansas, young Douglas Kennedy’s quiet, God-fearing accountant father had beaten him senseless every evening with a leather strap.”
When I read this, I rested my forehead in my hand and tried to pretend that it was possible for a child to be beaten senseless every day and still survive without either 1. brain damage 2. physical disability 3. visits from Social Services 4. dropping out of school and running away from home. That’s not the only form of abuse Mr. Kennedy meted out, either, so it became obvious that the suspension of disbelief would involve hanging it by the neck until it was dead. I also wished that the author would not have made this strap-happy pappy a devout Christian. It’s a cheap shot, at best. I have no objections to the portrayal of religious people having feet of clay, but not in this incredibly clichéd manner.
Anyway, the author clearly takes pity on Doogie, because he gives this human punching bag a love interest, scientist Gaby Lopez, who is described as “seriously pretty”. I’m starting to see a pattern in the descriptions of women : “seriously {insert one-word comment on looks}”. But on with the show. With the characterization complete – the Nazis are evil, the natives are good, what more do you need to know? – we plunge right into the best part of Temple, the
“Get--”
Punch.
“--off--”
Punch.
“--my--”
Punch.
“--boat!”
The above is taken from the description of a professor of linguistics fighting a trained Nazi commando. Guess which one is delivering the roundhouse punches and the snappy dialogue? Guess which one falls off the boat?
Sorry, just had to get that out of my system before I continued any further. The plot, such as it is, revolves around the idol carved from thyrium. The various groups out to obtain this idol are :
Why the Log Cabin Republicans and the NAACP didn’t join in as well is another mystery. As it is, the action moves with a breathless pace from one group to another; as soon as all the Nazis have been killed, DARPA turns bad and Race has to escape from them; once they’re out of the picture, it’s the Texan militiamen’s turn to be pummeled by the bad-ass professor. Indiana Jones is a wimp compared to this guy, but so is everyone else. Both the Nazis and the Texans prime a Supernova and set the timer, and each time, Race guesses the deactivation code during the last few seconds, while dodging bullets. It was unrealistic enough the first time, but the second time, it became ludicrous. The author did his best by explaining that the person who set the ignition sequence for the second bomb was Race’s brother (remember, the one who married the cheating ex-girlfriend) and the brother always used a certain code. It didn’t make matters any more believable.
The fifty-page river scene with the Nazis is especially hard to imagine, since it involves Jet Raiders, Rigid Raiders, a Goose, a Scarab and a catamaran, all racing along the river at breakneck speed while Race rides a Pibber along the wing of a seaplane and onto the Nazi boat. Perhaps Pibber operation was one of his mandatory physical education courses when he was studying Latin and German. At least we are told how he becomes familiar with the firing of weaponry such as G-11s and M-16s; his brother was a gun buff and often told him about such things. Lucky bastard. My brother was a brown belt, but intellectual osmosis failed to make me equally conversant regarding karate. Race defeats the Nazis and is hailed by the natives as their chosen one, who can kill an eighteen-foot caiman in single combat. Naturally, he does so, even though they’re in the water at the time. He also realizes that there are two idols, a real one and a fake one, though at this point, everything felt pretty much fake, so I stopped reading and started skimming. Much to my lack of surprise, the end of the novel mentioned Race getting the seriously cute girl and Doogie getting the seriously pretty girl and the happy couples returning home safely. I’ll just mention two last unbelievable occurences for the road. The first was when the DARPA traitor, who was shot in the stomach, had his hands amputated by the angry natives prior to their feeding him to the giant cats. This guy is described as conscious and screaming to the last, although he should have been unconscious or dead through shock and blood loss. Everyone in Reillyworld, except for the Nazis, is built like a Terminator.
The second deus ex machina, literally, occurs when Race is in a tank along with the leader of the militiamen, and this tank falls from a cargo plane “at phenomenal speed” (emphasis by the author). Inside the tank, Race deactivates the second Supernova while the militia guy shoots at him with a Calico pistol. He then gets to the hatch a nanosecond (the author loves that word) before the tank hits the ground. Luckily, his bulletproof vest is a special make that includes a jet-pack, and these are designed to activate automatically eighty feet above the ground. Go Go Gadget Jet-Pack! So, much to Race’s surprise and my disappointment, he floats up like Tinkerbell while the tank is destroyed. I get the impression that the author planned this scene while sitting next to his sofa and racing Matchbox toys along it until they plunged to the floor with whooshing sound effects. Still, anyone can write a plot where an indestructible superhero conquers all odds; what really sets Temple apart is the bubbling, pop-eyed
The Goose banked wildly – so wildly in fact that the tip of its pontoonless left wing actually touched the water, kicking up a spectacular shower of spray!
Think lots of italics and lots of exclamation marks, especially when explaining something that the reader might not get otherwise.
Her eyes went wide with horror.
Anistaze was going to decapitate Race with the blades of the chopper!
There’s also a great deal of onomatopeia, helpfully set apart by italics :
Click!
Poof!
Blam!
It’s like that old Batman show. You can tell that Matthew Reilly had a great deal of fun writing this book; what’s less obvious is if anyone will have fun reading it. Still, I can think of things far more scary than giant cats and killer Nazis. Temple : The Sequel, Temple : Race Is Back, And This Time It’s Personal, Templenator II : Judgment Race. Perhaps next time, if the US Army wants to find an idol and kill the competition even quicker, they can recruit the Dean of Race’s college. He might say, “Get – off – my – boat!” in a language the Nazis could understand. Then he wouldn’t need to punch them off it, would he?