Island author Chris Knowles added two titles this year to his oeuvre of what we may call current events thriller fiction.
A former naval intel officer and the offspring of a CIA staffer, Mr. Knowles seems to have a sense of what’s coming.
Last year, for example, he penned “The Head of the Snake,” a story of the U.S. president’s abduction by ISIS during his annual Island vacation. At the time of the writing, ISIS was still a comer in the Mideast terrorist firmament, but its tactics since have shoved al-Qaeda and the Taliban to the backbench of media attention.
Now Mr. Knowles brings us “Upon This Rock,” a tale of the Vatican Bank, Saudi oil interests, and a small U.S. green energy company caught in their crossfire. He’s also published “An Ill Wind from the East,” another close-to-reality fictionalized account of three superpowers wrestling over energy supplies.
In “Upon This Rock,” Mr. Knowles draws upon the impact of the dialogue created by Pope Francis’s call for ecologically sound energy sources to replace fossil fuel on the global environment. Mr. Knowles mixes it with a savvy Saudi royal family whose meal ticket is fossil fuel oil production. He tosses in the scamps at the Vatican Bank, who make the Medicis look like choirboys, and we are off and running.
The plot pivots around Syngenix, a Utah-based startup that has developed a solar energy process that produces 20 percent more energy, a major clean energy breakthrough and an alarming prospect for the world’s oil patches. A young Saudi prince discovers that Syngenix startup funding came from the Vatican Bank at a time when Pope Francis is calling for more clean energy sources. Is the pope shilling for Vatican Bank investment? Zesty stuff, but who wants to diss the pope? The media, of course, so the prince uses a network of tech spies to plant the story with the Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ story blows up Synergix and crimps the green energy industry. In his epilogue, Mr. Knowles offers the prospect of an unchanged future, based on his view of the financial unsustainability of green industry without government or other benefactors, ensuring “that an environmentalist could recharge his Prius and the Saudi royal family could sleep well at night.”
“An Ill Wind from the East” also deals with fossil fuel issues, of a different sort in a different part of the world.
China needs oil and gas. Russia has a lot of both. So do the holds of tanker ships that pass right by atolls, land fragments claimed by no less than six Asian countries bordering the South China Sea. As we know, China booted South Vietnam off one atoll, filled it in, and set up fortifications. In the novel, the move enables a two-option plan: Buy what China needs from Russian oil and gas surpluses, or just board the tankers and take it. Or both, if you’re thinking big.
China makes a 20-year sweetheart deal with cash-strapped Russia, which happily deep-sixes its contracts with European and Asian nations that would then be free to freeze in the dark. This is an uh-oh moment for U.S. President Terrance Hayes, which is resolved after some brinkmanship, a dollop of nasty hacking, and the sinking of a would-be Chinese pirate warship. The resolution involves the three nations working together. I know; crazy.
To be clear: Mr. Knowles’ literary style will not cause you to place his work in proximity to Ludlum or even Clancy. What is valuable is what we learn about the world in which we are living today.
He actually researches and reads readily available information and incorporates it into his fiction, to the benefit of those of us who know way more about Rihanna than we do about Riyadh.
Examples? Sure. Did you know that while our leaders rend their public garments calling for peace in the Middle East, our defense industry provided 47 percent of all arms shipped to the Middle East between 2010–14?
How ’bout this? The Vatican Bank (real name: the Institute for the Works of Religion) holds the Vatican’s money, but the Pope can’t tell it what to do.
And then there’s the Dorothy syndrome. We don’t get meaningful information from government or media, so it’s difficult to know whether we’re in Kansas or not. At least, thanks to Mr. Knowles’ work and some follow-up Googling, I know why China and South Vietnam were shooting each other over a few acres in the middle of the ocean.