The Way the Wind Blew: A thriller that revives a forgotten piece of history
The Way the Wind Blew: A thriller that revives a forgotten piece of history
A book review by Vinay Kolhatkar
The opening chapter in this novel sits alongside the most eloquent that I have ever encountered. The inciting incident of the story is so well-handled that it reminded me of John Grisham's The Street Lawyer; how well in that book had a sense of intrigue immediately thrust itself squarely between our ears. In a similar cut of vividly written prose, Walter Donway brings the reader immediately to a sense of foreboding—`if the shoppers and idlers who had filled Boston's Prudential Center had glanced up to see a 40-foot-wide sheet of glass swaying above them, life would have seemed more precarious.' A drama needs to explode off the blocks after such a foreshadowing, and this one does.
The storyline is based loosely on the activities of some of the violent Marxist revolutionary groups of the 70s, most notably the Weather Underground, whose 1969 position paper had the Bob Dylan song lyric in its title—You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Two protagonists are doing the hunting: a good-hearted, athletic, 34-year old cop, Martin Trepan, and a very intriguing, ex-Korean female war-veteran (of sorts), Mi-Sun Kane. Mi-Sun's daughter by a US marine, Carrie Kane, has gone missing, as has Martin's crime-fighting partner, and both hunters have a hunch that the two cases of the missing persons are not only linked, but are both inexorably joined at the hip to the bombing that rocks Boston.
The supporting cast consists mainly of Boston University dean Allston Weybright and his wife Sybil, a professor Morris Lisk and his wife, Esther, and an unnamed stranger so strong that he can rip open and crack the jaws of a charging German Shepherd with his bare hands.
The best part is that, akin to a modern-television-serial style drama, everyone is playing games with everyone else. The characters lift off the page in one visceral scene after another, as the hint of romance between the hunters adds another dimension to the gripping tale.
I found the Mi-Sun character to be quite a standout—my favourite in the cast by a long margin even as the author keeps the perspective of the cop, Martin Trepan, as the principal one. That perspective helps, however, as the story unfolds the way real-life police would chase it—painstakingly, clue by clue, lead-by-lead, one dead-end after another, by letting the mix of intuition and evidence be their only guide. At no stage does the author overdramatise the yarn, nor does he yield to the temptation of the deus ex machina—the god in the machine literary device, essentially a coincidence that allows a writer to create an unpredictable ending. In the end, the climax is satisfying but a tad less than exhilarating.
But what Walter Donway yields in contrived excitement he gains in authenticity. He will have none of the romanticisation of the Leninist radicals of the 2012 Hollywood film The Company You Keep, directed by and starring Robert Redford. Donway shows the terrorists for what they were, i.e. violent criminals; his focus is not the family sacrifices made by the extremists. The sympathies of his principal protagonist lie, not with the misguided intellectuals who let themselves champion terrorism, but with the innocent victims of random violence.
The internal monologue of the principal protagonist and his dialogues with the university professor reminded me of Ayn Rand’s 1965 essay The Cashing-in: The Student Rebellion. In that, Rand demolished the arbitrary distinction between force and violence that the rebels created as an evasion; Donway on the other hand takes the rebels’ philosophy to its logical, destructive end. He studiously avoids the needless romanticisation of the radicals who became murderers and of the professors who turned a blind eye to mass murder and thereby sanctioned it. In the end, he creates what is essentially a highly romanticist story, one in which the cop and the mother relentlessly pursue their respective objectives.
I had very few misgivings—my only reservation was the amount of exposition needed in the aftermath, brought forth in dialogue between the two hunters—which exposition could well have been had in the pre-climax inter-cop or inter-hunter discussions. But that's a minor blemish in what was an arresting read; an engaging, convincing, cops and killers story with a romance, which also kindled my interest in reading further about America's forgotten piece of history—about its first home-grown Marxist-Leninist terrorists, the men and women of the Far Left. One could hardly ask for more.
The Way the Wind Blew: They Battled America's First Terrorists, authored by Walter Donway, is available on Amazon in digital and paperback copies.
Vinay Kolhatkar is a Sydney-based novelist, freelance journalist, and finance professional. He is the author of The Frankenstein Candidate: A Woman Awakens to a Web of Deceit, a political thriller available on Amazon, Book Depository and various other online outlets.
A book review by Vinay Kolhatkar
The opening chapter in this novel sits alongside the most eloquent that I have ever encountered. The inciting incident of the story is so well-handled that it reminded me of John Grisham's The Street Lawyer; how well in that book had a sense of intrigue immediately thrust itself squarely between our ears. In a similar cut of vividly written prose, Walter Donway brings the reader immediately to a sense of foreboding—`if the shoppers and idlers who had filled Boston's Prudential Center had glanced up to see a 40-foot-wide sheet of glass swaying above them, life would have seemed more precarious.' A drama needs to explode off the blocks after such a foreshadowing, and this one does.
The storyline is based loosely on the activities of some of the violent Marxist revolutionary groups of the 70s, most notably the Weather Underground, whose 1969 position paper had the Bob Dylan song lyric in its title—You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Two protagonists are doing the hunting: a good-hearted, athletic, 34-year old cop, Martin Trepan, and a very intriguing, ex-Korean female war-veteran (of sorts), Mi-Sun Kane. Mi-Sun's daughter by a US marine, Carrie Kane, has gone missing, as has Martin's crime-fighting partner, and both hunters have a hunch that the two cases of the missing persons are not only linked, but are both inexorably joined at the hip to the bombing that rocks Boston.
The supporting cast consists mainly of Boston University dean Allston Weybright and his wife Sybil, a professor Morris Lisk and his wife, Esther, and an unnamed stranger so strong that he can rip open and crack the jaws of a charging German Shepherd with his bare hands.
The best part is that, akin to a modern-television-serial style drama, everyone is playing games with everyone else. The characters lift off the page in one visceral scene after another, as the hint of romance between the hunters adds another dimension to the gripping tale.
I found the Mi-Sun character to be quite a standout—my favourite in the cast by a long margin even as the author keeps the perspective of the cop, Martin Trepan, as the principal one. That perspective helps, however, as the story unfolds the way real-life police would chase it—painstakingly, clue by clue, lead-by-lead, one dead-end after another, by letting the mix of intuition and evidence be their only guide. At no stage does the author overdramatise the yarn, nor does he yield to the temptation of the deus ex machina—the god in the machine literary device, essentially a coincidence that allows a writer to create an unpredictable ending. In the end, the climax is satisfying but a tad less than exhilarating.
But what Walter Donway yields in contrived excitement he gains in authenticity. He will have none of the romanticisation of the Leninist radicals of the 2012 Hollywood film The Company You Keep, directed by and starring Robert Redford. Donway shows the terrorists for what they were, i.e. violent criminals; his focus is not the family sacrifices made by the extremists. The sympathies of his principal protagonist lie, not with the misguided intellectuals who let themselves champion terrorism, but with the innocent victims of random violence.
The internal monologue of the principal protagonist and his dialogues with the university professor reminded me of Ayn Rand’s 1965 essay The Cashing-in: The Student Rebellion. In that, Rand demolished the arbitrary distinction between force and violence that the rebels created as an evasion; Donway on the other hand takes the rebels’ philosophy to its logical, destructive end. He studiously avoids the needless romanticisation of the radicals who became murderers and of the professors who turned a blind eye to mass murder and thereby sanctioned it. In the end, he creates what is essentially a highly romanticist story, one in which the cop and the mother relentlessly pursue their respective objectives.
I had very few misgivings—my only reservation was the amount of exposition needed in the aftermath, brought forth in dialogue between the two hunters—which exposition could well have been had in the pre-climax inter-cop or inter-hunter discussions. But that's a minor blemish in what was an arresting read; an engaging, convincing, cops and killers story with a romance, which also kindled my interest in reading further about America's forgotten piece of history—about its first home-grown Marxist-Leninist terrorists, the men and women of the Far Left. One could hardly ask for more.
The Way the Wind Blew: They Battled America's First Terrorists, authored by Walter Donway, is available on Amazon in digital and paperback copies.
Vinay Kolhatkar is a Sydney-based novelist, freelance journalist, and finance professional. He is the author of The Frankenstein Candidate: A Woman Awakens to a Web of Deceit, a political thriller available on Amazon, Book Depository and various other online outlets.
