Shibumi Book

Nicholai Hel is such a stud duck bad-ass that even if James Bond, Indiana Jones, Jason Bourne and the Dos Equis's Most Interesting Man in the World banded together to try and take him down, he'd just kill them all with a drinking straw while lecturing them on the evils of their materialism. Then he'd have mind blowing sex with their girlfriends.

Hel was born to a exiled Russian countess in Shanghai in the '20s and a Japanese general thinks the young man has such an exceptional talent for the game Go that he sends him to Japan to train. Hel spends years before and during World War II learning the game and immersing himself in Japanese culture. After the war, he gets on the bad side of the occupation forces and spends years in prison. Once released, he becomes an international assassin.

Decades later, Hel has retired to his chateau in the mountains with the Basque where he indulges in his hobby of spelunking. However, when the niece of an old friend gets caught up in an international conspiracy led by an oil corporation, Hel will have to decide if an old debt to that friend extends to protecting the woman against powerful international forces.

I only vaguely knew about Trevanian after reading Incident at Twenty Mile, but since Don Winslow, one of my favorite crime writers, just released an authorized prequel to this book, I had to check it out. What I found is that Trevanian has done a sly parody of the spy novel here with the incredible Hel being a character of pulp superhero style attributes. Not only he is brilliant with a gift for languages, he is also a mystic capable of going into trances where he becomes one with the universe and he has a 'proximity sense' that allows him to sense other people and their moods.. In addition to all that, he's a martial arts expert and a world class cave explorer. Oh, and he's the world's foremost lover who can literally ruin a woman for other men if he unleashes his full power upon her.

Trevanian's playing with the format of the spy novel extends to the structure of the book. The first half of the novel consists of the minions of the evil "Mother Company" researching Hel's origin story after the become worried that he may try to ruin their plans. (The whole idea of the Mother Company being an energy conglomerate that is the real power behind the government to the point where their man Diamond has set up his own office in the CIA and started giving orders to everyone is a conspiracy theorist's dream come true.)

After half the book is spent discussing what a bad ass Hel is, the next quarter of the book is an account of Hel and his friend exploring a cave. It's only in the last part of the book that the action picks up, but even then, we barely see Hel actually do anything although he does manage to pile up a respectable body count in the last chapters.

I liked this book and the way that Trevanian was having some fun with the genre by creating such an over the top character but playing it completely straight. However, there was one aspect that kept bugging me. Trevanian was a staunch anti-materialist. Hel shares this attitude and looks down his nose with contempt at the 'merchants' of the world. He has claimed the moral high ground by living in his mountain house with few modern comforts.

Yet, even thought Hel is continually portrayed as being the superior person for his way of life, there's no mention made about how a guy who claims to hate materialism spent years killing people for money, and then spent a fortune on a house in the mountains to live in isolation. So I guess it takes a huge amount of money to truly live a non-materialistic lifestyle. After a while, Hel's smug and hypocritical attitude about this annoyed the hell out of me because it seemed like the one part of the book Trevanian was serious about.