The Last Centurion

Author: John Ringo

Publisher: Baen Books

Quick Sketch: Narrator overcomes political stupidity while surviving an end-of-the-world near-miss

Quick Review: Avoid like the plague, unless you're an American conservative (actually not even then)

It's not often I walk away from a book swearing. It's even less often it'll make me do it within the first ten chapters. That's what happened with me when I read the preview of The Last Centurion on Baen Books' website (www.baen.com) in the summer of '08. It actually took me two goes to read the nine chapters available and I'll be honest: I finished it in a morbid desire to see just how bad it could get. I then (not very) quietly steamed to my friends about it and did my level best to forget about it. Nine months of denial later (with muchous venting), I downloaded the full version (legally). My opinion fell even further. I not just disliked the plot and ideas, I actually found the entire thing to be mind-numbingly bad from almost every viewpoint.

Let's start with a statement: I am not a conservative, especially not the American version of the same. I'm a liberal. In the last few elections I've found myself leaning towards Liberal Democrat, but I haven't made my mind up who I'm voting for in the next election (David Cameron has made a positive impression on me, but then again so has Nick Clegg). As such, I am not TLC's target audience. I am not supposed to like this book.

The Last Centurion is written in an autobiographical/ blog style. It recounts the main character(Bandit Six as he calls himself)'s experiences during what he delightfully terms 'The Time of Suckage'. This is around 2019, when bird flu goes pandemic (the Plague) and global cooling (the Big Chill) thrashes the world's eco-system. The damage (30%-60% of the world's population, see later) is further exacerbated by the titanic failures of the Democratic US President. Bandit Six recounts his story of being abandoned in the Middle East and fighting his way back home, only to have to fix the US when he gets there.

Ringo's biggest failing here is writ large across the whole book. Quite simply, he can't do the first person perspective. Only three characters leap off the page at you: Samad, the leader of the Nepalese troops Bandit Six ends up with, President Warrick, the Democratic President who is simply stunning in her outright caricature of Hillary Clinton (it verges on libel, to be blunt), and of course Bandit Six himself. Unfortunately, this isn't to suggest that they're good characters. Samad comes of as a confused British Empire copycat, Warrick is one-dimensionally insane and Bandit Six is a hyper partisan know-it-all. Every other character is barely named and little more than a cipher (his entire chain of command is reduced to their ranks and Bandit Six's opinion of them).

This is one of the real irritants of TLC: Bandit Six. I can to be frank, kinda of ignore his screaming partisanship, but his know-it-all nature just drags and drags and drags. TLC is divided into three books. In book one, he explains (in nine chapters of progressively more irritating detail) how the world and the US collapses, via his knowledge of farming (he's the son of a farmer). Book two details his experiences of in the Middle East as it all collapses. Book Three finishes with his exploits in the US as he rebuilds the agricultural system and then deals with some of the worst hit areas.

Problem is, he comes off as somewhere between Superman, Einstein and God. During the course of the book he lays the ground work for an independent Kurdistan and a Persian nation allied to the US, creates two hyper-popular TV shows, saves the US agricultural system, saves Detroit from Islamic servitude and shatters the US media's liberal bias. He constantly dumps massive amounts of information at you, all of which seems to have passed the government by. The book comes of as a massive amount of 'I-love-me' which is just shocking. By the end you're waiting for Bandit Six to pull another massive save out of his ass.

Another element that just falls over is his TV show 'The Centurions'. Basically, as Bandit Six is passing through Baghdad, Rupert Murdoch (humourously, Ringo seems not to have noticed that A) Murdoch is Australian, and B) he also owns Fox), in an attempt to up his ratings, drops a camera crew on him to get some real info on what he's up to (Bandit Six's unit having become a bit of a cause celebre by now, thanks to being abandoned). Bandit Six then forces them to show what he's really doing, rather than being the usual liberally-biased media. It becomes a smash hit almost over night.

Ringo writes TLC as if the reader is familiar with the TV show. This simply does not work. A particularly good example is an episode called 'Cam(P)ing' which Bandit Six describes how funny it is to watch afterwards but how steamed he was at the time. Problem is, you never get told why he was so steamed (All you know is that the Nepalese manage to accidentally blow up one of his support vehicles). 'Cam(P)ing' is referred to several times, but it's never actually explained what happens. Thus you are left with this confused question in your head for the rest of the book.

The political bias within TLC is frankly stunning. Every chance Ringo gets, he blames one of three groups: The liberals, the media or the State Department (though mostly the liberals). He cheerfully details case studies, which show liberals being less able to deal with difficult situations (during this he just devolves to calling them tofu-eating grasshoppers. I hate Tofu, by the way), being less competent and more selfish. Whenever the sensible option isn't available, it's the fault of one of the three. It's plot by numbers, giving you the feeling the book was sponsored by the Republican National committee or the NRA.

This bias comes across most blatantly with President Warrick. He characterises her from the beginning as ideologically bound, clueless and a micro-manager. In fact she's so incompetent, I just kept thinking she was inspired by Bush, but even he's not that bad (A particular favourite of mine is the emergency powers act her mindless Congress passes which allows for the removal of habeus corpus. Remind me again which President and party actually did that in the last decade?). What bothers me the most here is that this book was release in July '08. This book was clearly intend to influence the election as Warrick is very obviously Hilary Clinton. There's one bit where Bandit Six is discussing the 'temporary king' concept of presidential power and he mentions the 'Bush, Warrick, Bush, Warrick' dynasty. Given that the time line (TLC starts in 2019) makes the above set up impossible: there's only two elections between now and then with you needing to some how fit in four elections, even assuming three single term presidencies, the only real conclusion is that he's really referring to 'Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton'.

It doesn't help that Bandit Six rabidly hates her (he generally refers to her as 'The Bitch'). There's one bit when he's detailing the messed up vaccination plan for the US and he describes the transcribed meeting between her and her advisors. She sides with her female (civilian)advisers, not her male (military) advisers. Ringo characterises this as militant feminism with the strident phrase 'Men had testicles and therefore were Wrong' (direct quote).

A final issue is the huge hammer aspect of the book. Nothing is subtle. His examples of media bias are more reminiscent of Soviet propaganda (near the end, he talks about a news report about civilians massacred where CNN has carefully avoided recording the manacles that held them in place while the bad guys used them as a human shield. Did I mention the media blames the US military?). Ringo has a huge problem in this respect. He simply doesn't seem to grasp convergence or individual bias. Instead, he constantly ascribes a sense of conspiracy to everything.

Frankly, I could go on and on about the sheer awfulness of The Last Centurion. There are dozens of other points I could make like his shilling for Bush, his yen for made up statements and some decidedly questionable racial statements. The ending makes the usual USA-USA hollywood movie ending look well written and original (it's less of a send-off and more an embarrassing rant), the book is disjointed and poorly plotted and the characterisation is paper-thin. Ringo has always allowed his politics to influence his writing, but this book simply removes the veneer of his usually excellent ideas, characters and laugh out loud dialogue. In its place we get a masterclass in how not to write in the first person and a sperm-soaked display of Conservative masturbation.

A final note: The Last Centurion most reminds me of the excellent Max Brooks novel World War Z. It's written in similar style (WWZ is a collection of interviews with survivors) and details the global collapse under the pressure of incoming apocalypse (due to a zombie invasion) and civilization's gradual resurgence. Problem is, WWZ is more believable. And it has zombies.