Published by Ecco on November 23, 2021
I read fiction, in part, to escape from reality. I don’t read many political novels because politics in the US is so ugly that I don’t need the stress of reading fiction that reinforces the ugliness. Escaping from politics with a novel about politics only works if the novel is amusing. The Days to Come isn’t funny but it is only a political novel in part. By the second half, the plot has morphed into a crime story.
The Days to Come is apparently the latest in a series that features political fixer Peter Rena. I can’t review it in that context because I’m not familiar with series.
Tom Rosenstiel imagines an unusual situation: a male Democrat runs for president with a female Republican running for vice president. They win and the president, David Traynor, dies within the first hundred days of his presidency. That’s an interesting plot driver, although the first half of the book seems intended as a blueprint to enact a political agenda. The agenda is worthy — it focuses on taking meaningful action to address climate change and six other crises — but that aspect of the story is a bit wonky to work well in a novel.
Traynor’s grand idea is one he didn’t share with the public before the election. He plans to make a massive public investment in flow batteries, an energy storage device that would allow solar and wind power to supplant fossil fuels. Traynor knows that half of Congress will oppose the investment because they are in bed with the fossil fuel industry and have no interest in solving existential threats, so Traynor uses his emergency powers to execute a secret plan that diverts budgeted money (primarily from national security) to invest in several startups that are working on the technology.
Part I sets up the premise and seems largely geared toward policy wonks. In Part II, the new president, Wendy Upton, worries that Traynor’s machinations, however well intended they might have been, will be exposed, jeopardizing both her presidency and the program itself. She enlists the help of Rena and his partner Randi Brooks to determine whether the startups are secure or whether the battery plan might be leaked to the press or stolen by Russian, Chinese, or Middle Eastern spies. Creeping into the story from time to time is a young man whose weak mind is easily influenced by the Q conspiracies that populate the least rational corners of the web.
Part III begins with a death that seems to be catastrophic for the battery plan. Was the death caused by murder? Well, this is a crime novel so the death is at least suspicious. Still, the primary crime that the book explores is not murder but foreign and corporate espionage. Investors from Russia and China pour investment capital into tech firms, make sure to have one of their own on the firm’s board. That person sends the company’s secrets back to the government that is either employing or threatening them. An FBI agent in the novel suggests that tech spying is commonplace, which is probably true, perhaps making this a cautionary novel. In any event, the protagonists devise a plan to root out spies that drives the last half of the story.
Rena’s background gives rise to a subplot. In his military days, Rena investigated a general, found that the general was guilty of sexual harassment on multiple occasions, and precipitated the general’s resignation by confronting him with the evidence in a way that might have been unnecessarily embarrassing. The internet has tumbled to this news and has gone nuts, as it tends to do, with the far right blaming Rena for destroying a man with trumped up charges. Rena also blames himself for destroying his marriage by creating stress that might have caused his wife’s multiple miscarriages. The net, of course, asserts that the marriage ended because Rena was a wife abuser. Perhaps the novel is also intended as a cautionary reminder of the destruction that is so easily inflicted by internet liars on the far right. If so, I doubt that the book will raise red flags as any reader attracted to this book is probably well aware of the daily onslaught of internet lies that pollute public discourse.
The components of The Days to Come are individually interesting, but they never quite cohere. The story can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a political novel, a murder mystery, a story about radicalized self-styled heroes whose minds have been corrupted by far-right conspiracy theories, a story about the orchestration of internet lies to destroy political opponents, or a corporate espionage novel. Rosensteil tries to do too much and fails to anything well. The story moves in so many directions that it never gains momentum in any direction. On the other hand, as a “message” novel about the need for bold action to solve serious political problems and the risk that corporate espionage will undermine those efforts, The Days to Come has some value.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS