Bibliofreakblog

The Army of the Republic by Stuart Archer Cohen

I picked up this book a few months ago, read a couple chapters, got bored, put it back down.  A few days ago I picked it back up and wondered how I could have possibly been bored the first time around.

Set in the near future, America has become a slave to corporations.  The Post Office has gone private.  So has water.  Voting has become a charade.

One group of Americans won’t stand for it, but are they freedom-fighters or are they terrorists?

On the other side, are CEOs who get their hands dirty violent people?  By footing the bill, or turning a blind eye, what is their level of responsibility?

Ah…do you see where I’m going with this?  It’s the intricacies of the characters, and their relationships that drive this novel.  Lando, the founder of the Army of the Republic, a group made partly of hippie environmentalists and partly ex-military, becomes a liaison to a civil group who wants them to stop blowing shit up and assassinating people and proposes a cease-fire.  Enter, the romantic plot line, when he starts sleeping with one of them.  However, I have to say, I never felt this relationship was forced.  The author pulls it off with ease.

Lando’s strange ties don’t end there.  His angst towards the corporates stems from a far deeper place than any of his comrades-in-arms could ever guess.

Meanwhile, on the corporate side, James Sands is between a rock and a hard place.  While he doesn’t particularly like the idea of whitehall, a security group with vague levels of authority and contracts with both corporations and the government, going after these “quasi-terrorists”, he doesn’t want his shit blown up, either.

I have to grant that part of why I found this book so chilling may be because it’s mostly set in Seattle, where I live.  Dropping in real places in the city, places I have been to, that I can clearly picture, may have added to a sense of reality.  On the other hand, Stuart Archer Cohen sets up the scene in such a natural way, with steps taken by the government (and then, in response, by the Army of the Republic, and so on and so forth), that it really seems like it could happen.  Not a page did I turn that I didn’t feel a chill of foreboding.  Like watching the Roman Empire crumble.

If I have one complaint, it’s the ending.  I would have liked more.  An open-ending is good, but there was absolutely not closure with one of the characters, and I really felt like nothing was going to change.  Which, you know, I can appreciate from an artistic stand-point, but from having just read over 400 pages of this scary alternative America, I, like so many of the masses in the book, needed to be reassured.

Yo FTC! I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.  For more information about Stuart Archer Cohen, visit his website.
Buy The Army of the Republic on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Makers by Cory Doctorow
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
A Nation of Sheep by Andrew Napolitano
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Daemon by Daniel Suarez
American Apocalypse: The Beginning by nova
Operation SERF by Chris Sullins
The Third Revolution by Anthony F. Lewis

Other works by Stuart Archer Cohen:

The Stone Angels
Invisible World