Babylon Babies Book

Dantec is a French writer, and I suspect his novel is poorly translated. Why else would "smoked meat" be italicized? Not one but twice, a character purchases smoked meat. Everyone says "gonna," as in "I'm gonna do this or that," but there are no other contractions or slang -- never a "we're" or "I'll," always "we are" or "I will." I tripped on repeated references to the XXth and XXIst centuries. And while I might use "Dr." when addressing a check to my dermatologist, I would never write a sentence like "The dr. sat down on a chair." Babylon Babies starts out as a good war story, focused on a mercenary soldier fighting in a war-torn region between China, Mongolia, and Russia. The conflict is based on current realities, projected only a little into the future. Dantec quickly introduces science fiction elements, a la the near-future fiction of William Gibson -- cyberpunks, mafia figures, artificial intelligence, secretive labs manipulating DNA, and an interesting plot line where the mercenary is hired by the Russian mafia to transport a pregnant girl carrying genetically-modified babies out of harm's way, then protect her to term. All good so far. Then, halfway through the novel, Dantec lays on a bunch of New Age nonsense about the wisdom of primitive peyote-smoking native shamans and cosmic snakes, a frankly unbelievable war between outlaw motorcycle gang militias with military capabilities approaching those of First World nation states, and two rival religious groups modeled on the Heaven's Gate cult (remember the group that committed mass suicide during the transit of Comet Hale-Bopp?), complete with male and female Do and Ti figures. We go from a conceivable, reality-founded near future to mere fantasy, mumbo-jumbo fantasy at that. At first I thought Dantec was joking, but as the plot became more and more ridiculous I began to think he must actually believe all this UFO cult conspiratorial horseshit, and I lost my grip on the story, flipping past page after page of self-indulgent drug-addled nonsense, looking for the threads I'd lost -- the soldier of fortune, the woman he's supposed to be guarding, the babies. The threads were still there, buried under a thick layer of distracting, repetitive verbiage, and I had to hunt for them. Can the novel's progression from solid near-future sci-fi to Weekly World News Bat Boy fantasy also be a result of poor translation? Somehow I doubt it, and I doubt I'll be reading any more work by Maurice Dantec.