Line of Fire

 

Line of Fire – W.E.B. Griffin

OK. I confess.  I’m officially done with this author and this particular series of his books. This book is part 5 of a 10-volume set titled “The Corps”.  I enjoyed the first 4 o.k., but by the time I got to this one, I just got tired of this series in a very big way.  I was actually surprised how much I was put off by this one.  It’s just too much like all of his other books, and nothing ever consequential seems to happen in the story. That’s o.k. after a while, but it just hit the limit for me by this one.

I’m reminded of when I was in college and my roommate and I used to watch a popular soap opera (‘As the World Turns’).  We really got into the show, but I gave up after six months because it took far too long for anything to really happen.  I guess soap operas focused much more on the drama of the actors as opposed to pushing a relevant story forward.  It was typical for the show to drag on with a particular plot line far too long, and instead interjected as much romance, intrigue, sinister characters, and useless arguing among the people.  So even though I enjoyed the soap opera for a while, it got old quick.  This is exactly how I felt while reading ‘Line of Fire’.

The story takes place in the first year of the U.S. involvement during World War II.  There really isn’t even a plot here.  I guess if you had to define a plot, you could say that it revolves around a few GIs who are ‘stranded’ on a Pacific island that is controlled by the Japanese.  Ideally, the U.S. would love to get the soldiers off the island, but such a tactic is never as easy as it sounds.   So even though this is the closest thing resembling a plot, this really isn’t the author’s focus.  He cares more about the everyday interactions of the various members of the marine corps and their day-to-day lives during this tumultuous time in American history.  Ironically, you never really feel like you’re reading about people in a war.  Many of the interactions and situations we read about could just as likely happen within the confines of the military during peace time, so we never really feel the “thrill” of the battle.   Just like a soap opera.

There’s far too many characters in these books for any reasonable reader to keep track.  It doesn’t help when the author keeps introducing new ones in the new books and retains all of the older ones from the older books as well. It also doesn’t help when he introduces a character on, say page 20, and we don’t read about the character again until around page 220.  These are mostly marines, so there really isn’t much difference between the bulk of the characters.  They’re all “tough” guys, most with shady violent pasts (but we NEED people like that in the marines!), they all drool over any woman in a dress, and they all seem to consume a gallon of booze each day.  Plus, there are a few “father and sons” as well as at least one pair of brothers.  Then there’s the marine who’s dating the aunt of another marine, a few politicians (who drink even more) and gobs and gobs of women who have no problem spreading their legs for anything in a uniform.  

So when we read about all of these episodes that take place more often in bars and hotel rooms than we do on the battlefield, it’s easy to get tired of such episodes when they happen over and over again.  Yes, all of these escapades happen in the first four books as well, and it didn’t bother me quite that much since the episodes were still novel.  As I’ve stated though, after reading book #5, it just got too old too quick for my tastes.

You do learn a lot about the comings and goings of how the military works. There’s a lot a politics that goes on in the military, and we’re exposed to a lot of nomenclature.  All of this was actually quite entertaining, but as I keep saying, it simply gets old after a while.

So I’m officially done.  I have the feeling that the remainder of these books in the series won’t be much different, so I’ll look for something else to occupy my reading time. No great loss.