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Keepers of the Peace
/ Keith Brooke
(1991)
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| Book Details |
| Publication Date |
14-11-1991 |
| Nr of Pages |
256 |
| Format (size) |
Paperback (17.8cm x 15.2cm) |
| Publisher |
Bantam Press |
| Language |
English |
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| Plot |
Jed Brindle is an alien. At least, that's what they call him on Earth. He's really a colony-bred soldier - augmented with cyborg implants - with the Extraterran Peacekeeping Force, fighting for control of what used to be the United States.
When he and his squad are sent behind enemy lines on a kidnap operation, it isn't long before things start to go wrong. Marooned in the desert with two wounded comrades and his quarry, Jed's mission becomes not just a struggle for survival but also a journey to rediscover the quiet, reliable farm boy he was before he became a machine for killing.
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| Notes |
Set in 2083/4, this novel envisages a future in which a fair percentage of humanity lives in Lagrangian-orbit space colonies which have not long before successfully fought their war of independence to rid themselves of direct governance from Earth. Indeed, now the boot is more on the other foot, since the colonies have a strong political and military presence on the home planet, where they dominate the waging of a not-quite-war between its dictatorship ally Grand Union and neighbouring CalTex -- two of the states into which the former USA has split.
Jed Brindle is an average lad from a small, largely agricultural space colony. When called up for the draft he does not, like many of his peers, opt for one of the seemingly relatively easy excuses to deny the call; he is eager enough to leave the stifling confines of home and find adventure in the military. Once there and fitted with implants to control mood, communicate with his fellows and all the other things that cyber-implants might be expected to do, he proves to be a frighteningly effective soldier -- possessed not just of the requisite fighting skills but also of a ruthlessness that scares his superiors. This book is his story.
Before we look at that story, a note on the book's structure. The main narrative runs linearly through the odd-numbered chapters. The even-numbered chapters consist of flashbacks that take the form of diary entries (some by Jed), interview quasi-transcripts, etc. The result of this is a very interesting one: at the same time that we are being pulled along by the events of the "now" we are being given an ever more rounded, and sometimes subtly shifting, depiction of Jed himself and of his times. There's something of the same feel, because of this, as when reading the John Dos Passos-influenced novels of John Brunner such as The Sheep Look Up (1972) and Stand on Zanzibar (1968). Brooke handles the dual strands of his narrative adroitly.
In the "now", Jed and a group of colleagues are conducting a plane hijack in order to kidnap a prominent CalTex figure, Cohen. Things go wrong, and the plane crashes in the middle of the desert with massive loss of life. Jed sets out to lead a small party comprising his injured military colleagues Amagat and Jacobi as well as the uninjured Cohen across the hostile terrain to the nearest Grand Union outpost, which is separated by a matter of just a few miles from the nearest CalTex outpost.
Along the way, as they survive the desert rigours and occasional aerial attack, Jed goes through a rite of passage -- not the stereotyped transition from adolescence to adulthood but something far more interesting than that: the transition from killing machine to human being. |
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