Trying too hard ( )

What is Kevin Powers? The reader is entitled to ask after reading his new novel A Line in the Sand. An Iraq war veteran, Powers came roaring out of the blocks in 2012 with his Hemingway-inspired war novel The Yellow Birds, a piece of genuinely literary fiction. While it may have reached further than it grasped (I cringe to read back my excitable review of it from 2013, which opined that parts of it "are as good as anything Hemingway ever wrote"), the book nevertheless deserved its acclaim. Powers followed it up with a capable but unmemorable collection of poems in 2014 and, in 2018, the novel A Shout in the Ruins, an overwrought Faulkner-lite literary meditation on violence set during the American Civil War: an ambitious, though sincere, artistic failure.

Powers' new effort, A Line in the Sand, reads better than A Shout in the Ruins, but it is, in its way, even more disconcerting. For how could it not read better? It's just a straight-up, by-the numbers thriller. A Shout in the Ruins was at least trying to carve something out of a literary terrain, and The Yellow Birds succeeded in doing so, but A Line in the Sand is just content, interchangeable with just about any thriller title or author you can find on those tragically banal shelves at your local bookshop or supermarket. There are infrequent reminders that Powers was once a real writer – the framing of a sentence here and there, or a moment such as Lieutenant Billings looking down on a corpse at the end of Chapter 18 – and a worthy central theme which seeks to shine light on private military contractors, but A Line in the Sand is firmly and uncourageously camped in generic thriller territory. How characters are introduced, backstory delivered, plots structured and story resolved, all come from the tried-and-tested Patterson/Baldacci/Grisham/Coben playbook.

As a thriller, it's fine. The pages turn easily, the deaths and the twists wring a little bit of emotion from the reader, and while you know where the book's going right from the start, Powers' theme and opinions are seeded capably into the plot. Said plot does require the idiot ball to not only be dropped by certain characters, but to bounce as well, but that's fine: I've never once found a thriller that's as sophisticated as its adherents claim. The format just can't take the weight. (Naming the main character Catherine Wheel is less fathomable, however.) One could rant for quite some while against some of the strange and implausible directions Powers takes his story – does it want to be a morality tale, an action thriller, or an extra-judicial fantasy? - but for a thriller, such things are forgivable as long as the pages keep turning and you spend a few hours of your life agreeably and frivolously. (They do, and you do.)

Rather, what's disappointing about the story is thrown into stark relief at its end. You see, at the end of the book, Powers and his publisher provide an excerpt from The Yellow Birds, and while the excerpt is only a few pages, the difference in vision, ambition and quality of writing is stark. One hopes that Powers may once again show himself to be a writer who stands apart, as opposed to being lost in the crowd, but on current evidence he looks to be yet another writer of potential swallowed up by the safe and complacent currents of mainstream commercial publishing, and left to drift downstream as a directionless piece of flotsam. Hemingway would never have allowed it; he'd have gone to Africa or to a war instead. A Shout in the Ruins suggested in 2018 that, worryingly, The Yellow Birds might have been a one-off. A Line in the Sand suggests that if Kevin Powers is now just pivoting to being a thriller writer, it might be time for him and I to part ways. ( )

This may or may not be worth reading, but I’ve discarded. I’d bought the Audible version and the chapter numbers are out of kilt. This made it so confusing to get into, as I’d have needed to make a cross reference chart in order to know the actual chapter and the display chapter. Discarded. ( )