This Feature appeared in The Hindu's Literary Review
AS popular art forms go, nothing captures public imagination in quite the same way as the thriller. Beginning with classic whodunnits, serial killers and spies, today's thrillers rock bestseller lists with their excursions into law, medicine, high finance and even religion. Moving from a genre that was wildly popular within its niche, the thriller, once defined both contextually and spatially, has broken all boundaries. The profusion and popularity of high voltage dramas set in court rooms, fast food corporations, hospitals, airports and computer firms is more than just a literary trend — it is a reflection of life as we know it today.
The last few decades have seen a virtual explosion in the genre of the thriller with traditional mystery and detective stories from P.D. James, Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwall, spy stories from Ken Follet, Colin Forbes, Robert Ludlum, John le Carre competing with medical and sci-fi thrillers from Michael Crichton, Robin Cook, courtroom intrigues from Scott Turow, John Grisham, Steve Martin and now religious and art conspiracy thrillers from Dan Brown, and Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason's latest blockbuster The Rule of Four. What is interesting though is that these intricate variations on the intrigue theme have each their distinguished predecessors. Sci-fi conspiracy dates back to H.G. Wells' War of the World. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a classic predecessor of Robin Cook stories like Chromosome 6 and Outbreak. Morris West wrote a racy religious Vatican conspiracy that dates back to the 1960s and lawyer cum detective Perry Mason stars in courtroom conflicts. So what makes this current spate of "specialty" thrillers different, almost a movement as it were?
Layman's manual
The answers to this seem to lie in the world we live in today — one of super specialisation and globalisation powered not just by politics but by micro economics. In this increasingly complex world, the thriller, with its detailed behind-the-scenes descriptions, whether in the esoteric world of banking as in Arthur Hailey's The Money Changers, or the frighteningly immediate yet complex world of medicine in Robin Cook's novels, becomes much more than a riveting airport read. It functions as a unique layman's manual, a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy as it were. The same reader who'd follow Michael Crichton's Airframe or his path breaking The Andromeda Strain with fascinated awe would be hard put to pick up the equivalent textbooks on aerodynamics and anatomy. Similarly, the average layman would seldom venture into a jargon filled treatise on various aspects of the law, its loopholes, its provisions and precedents. And yet, as citizens in a democratic society, the rights and wrongs of conflicts, the understanding of how and why a government can order another citizen to pay money, give up their children, even to be imprisoned or put to death are issues of compelling interest. In this context a book like John Grisham's The Chamber is much more than a taut tale, it is an incisive and legally coherent argument against the death penalty.
The current crop of specialty thrillers is also striking in their delineations of grey. No more the black and white or red of political drama or the criminal versus society of the pure detective novel. Today's thrillers engage social themes and ethical questions with gusto whether it is racism and information technology in Hari Kunzru's Transmission or religious conditioning and conspiracy in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Grisham's thrillers trace the murky background of courtroom conflict and big business looking at jury selection and the tobacco industry in The Runaway Jury or law and crime in The Firm. Robin Cook's Fatal Cure attacks the anomalies of the health care system, his Vital Signs explores the issue of in-vitro reproduction and Toxin indicts the fast food industry.
Specialty thrillers today are therefore much more than suspense stories — they are in many senses social documents of fundamental interest, both in the way they pick up on society's current fears and in the manner in which they outline them. Packed with a wealth of circumstantial detail, they appeal to the general reader in their approximation to real life, the information they provide as well as their racy resolution.
New realities
Like modern day film, which gets technically more competent and more realistic, specially in conflict sequences, whether its epic battles or car chases, today's thrillers are truly cinematic. If Arthur Conan Doyle described a surgeon vis-à-vis his clothes and maybe his chambers, today's specialty thriller will get up, close and personal as he picks up his scalpel, glorying in the nitty gritty, the hows, the whys and the therefores. Like modern day science, the thriller investigates everything, and unlike science it has the benefit of an ethical viewpoint. Also unlike science it has the advantage of imagination on its side.
Fact and fiction
It is this provocative blend of fact and fiction most recently exemplified in the best selling Da Vinci Code that makes it so unique. Set against a backdrop of organised religion already reeling under allegations of long hidden conspiracies of silence, of excesses and of abuse, the events in the Da Vinci Code use a fascinating mix of religious geography, iconography and art history to uncover a secret conspiracy. From ancient history to technology, thrillers today dip into different areas of special research to construct concepts simultaneously novel yet frighteningly believable. In a world beset by religious fundamentalism and conflict as it hurtles towards progress, this heady combination of different specialist ideas, their consequences and resolutions seems one way of understanding reality — whether it is molecular manufacturing, biotechnology and the behavioural science of bees and ants in Michael Crichton's Prey or the combination of venture capitalism, interactive online games and e-mail viruses in Hari Kunzru's Transmission.
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