Juvenile Thriller, Unintentional: Shibumi, by Trevanian, is one of the silliest books I have ever read. After completing the entire Aubrey/Maturin series and shocking myself with its polar opposite in Kerouac's On the Road, I was looking for a little escapism. In the past I have turned to Ian Fleming's James Bond for a well-crafted, masculine, but undemanding read, but I have finished those and his successors hold little interest for me (with the exception of the one by Kingsley Amis). At some point in my surfings I came across a recommendation for Shibumi as a thoughtful spy thriller. I looked it up on Amazon and the reader reviews were fives, so I made the plunge. And it was truly silly.

It starts out fairly well. We are introduced to a sinister oil cabal called the Mother Company that essentially controls the world -- standard 1970s spy stuff. During one of the Mother Company's operations, a woman who should have been killed escapes. She flees and seeks the assistance of one Nicholai Hel, a retired professional assassin of superhuman abilities who owed a mortal debt to her uncle. However, it turns out, deep in the past, Hel had killed the brother of the Mother Company operative who was in charge of the failed operation. Revenge and honor are set to collide. A pretty well-wrung plotline.

Trevanian is a good stylist, and he has a talent for character sketches, which helps to suck you in a bit. But he does go on. The book is approximately 60% bloat, whether it be superfluous characters or inconsequential events or excruciatingly detail. Dude, omit needless words. Hell, omit needless chapters.

Nicholai Hel, the lead character, starts out with a good back story told as a flashback. Born to a displaced Russian aristocrat in pre-war Shanghai, he is taken under the wing of one of the Japanese occupiers and eventually gets an excellent upbringing in Japan. This all falls apart when the Japanese empire is defeated. We are treated to excellent non-standard descriptions and judgments of occupied Japan and good set-up of conflict between traditional Japanese cultural and the inevitable Westernization; a very promising start.

Then it spirals down the toilet in short order. Behavior stemming from this cultural conflict leads Nicholai to spend 3 days getting tortured followed by 3 years in solitary confinement. He gets out by performing a government sanctioned assassination, and thus finds his life long career. When we then rejoin Nicholai in the present he has developed a super-human proximity sense (he knows when you're nearby) that gives him tremendous advantages over any individual opponent, and he is a master of a martial art called "naked-death" which emphasizes the use of everyday objects as deadly weapons. There is even a line to the effect of it being estimated that in an average room he has 22 means assassination at his disposal, or something like that. Really? But can he turn back time by flying backwards around the Earth? Worse yet, we are treated to multiple expositions on his unmatched sexual prowess. Apparently he can bring a woman to unknown heights of ecstasy just by thinking about it.

OK, that may be slight hyperbole. But he has been known to punish women by pleasuring them, but only once, forcing them to live the rest of their lives in longing. I am not making that one up. I felt like Jim Kelly confronting Dr. Hahn in Enter the Dragon: "Man, you are right out of a comic book."

But even worse than that is the speechmaking. Everyone in this book is constantly pontificating about the failings of others (from character flaws, to immorality, to outright perversions) and all of it is bracketed with agonizing, cringe-inducing cultural/national/sociological context. No nationality or ethnicity is given a break. Characters seem to be assigned a cultural heritage based on whatever convenient prejudice was close at hand to the author. The condescension is thick as a brick, and it's all delivered lecture style. Virtually every character in this book is a shallow, arrogant prick.

I have learned my lesson: I need to seriously discount Amazon reader ratings from now on. Actually, I should stop trying to find readable spy stories. Authors seem to use the genre as a way to act out their unfulfilled teenaged fantasies rather than actually write a novel (apart from Fleming, and then only the best of him). In an interview, Trevanian once said that Shibumi should be the last word in the "super spy" genre. God, let's hope so.