It's wonderful news for every intelligent reader that John Calvin Batchelor has decided to write a "red-baiting quartet," that is, a "sci-fi/spy guy" tetralogy on the infinite folly and silliness of the Cold War.
Volume I featured G. Gordon Liddy as a major character. This new specimen, "Walking the Cat by Tommy 'Tip' Paine" peels the clothes off yet another emperor of our Cold War imagination, and gives us the "wild East" to ponder: ". . . The Pacific Rim," some financier, addled with American greed, remarks to Mr. Paine, "It's a boomtown, like the Klondike. There's gold in them thar' hills."
The post-Cold War situation in which sci-fi/spy-guy Tip Paine finds himself is disconcerting: "The dollar was up, the pound was down, the yen sideways, the Germans were petting the commies, the commies were tendering more laughingstock. Out east, China was pouting, Mongolia was rearming, Vietnam was panhandling, Burma was still changing the name on the stationery, North Korea was backfilling mass graves and tunnels. Welcome, red boys to the land of the disenchanted."
Movie writer/sci-fi/spy-guy Tip Paine has had it with the recent past, public and personal. He lives alone, like a medieval hermit, at the penultimate top of a Manhattan skyscraper, pecking fretfully at video war games on his laptop computer. By "chance" he meets an extremely likable, middle-aged Korean governess, Rosemary Yip, who spends most of her time holding together the complex family that lives upstairs in the penthouse.
The Purcell menage includes a flock of American and Korean children (the Korean ones adopted), a pretty blond mom, a red-haired "spinster" aunt who's been to bed with high-rollers all across the world, and, as paterfamilias, Charlie Purcell, world-class financier, scavenger, tantrum-thrower, opium-smoker, crybaby, blabber and all-round poor personality.
As soon as he gets to know Tip, Charlie throws himself on the sci-fi guy's mercy. Someone's been blackmailing him, Purcell sobs, lies, brags, swaggers, and so on. It's a terrible thing. It started all the way back in 1974, in Korea, where Purcell was in the occupying U.S. Army. Only Tip can get Purcell free of this messy business.
Which gives the real author, here, John Calvin Batchelor, a chance to twirl his fictional globe and take us on a particularly unattractive time-trip back to the Korean War. What was the point? What was the story on that?
