This novel seems made to order for transfer to the screen. Think John Wick does Vancouver
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From the lethal jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam to the mean streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Barry Levy’s The War Machine is an almost perfect noir thriller, complete with all the genre’s iconic characters, themes and plot devices.
Tormented, hard drinking action hero? Check. Trusty side kick? Check. Beautiful woman in peril-check. Mysterious villains, foreign and domestic- check. Gory violence complete with blood spatters and bullet impacts? Check. Corruption in high places? Check. Spies and crime lords? Check. Levy deploys all these elements with a smooth expertise that is unusual in a debut novel.
But while The War Machine is Levy’s first novel, he comes to it with a wealth of related experience. The tyro novelist had a successful career as an actor and screen writer before turning his hand to prose fiction, and he has also worked as a radio broadcaster. He earned an MFA from UBC’s department of creative writing, and his film The Shasta Triangle won the Best Feature Film award at the 2020 Roswell Sci-fi Film Festival.
The “war machine” of the title has at least two meanings, and the tension between the two energizes the novel. The book’s protagonist is himself a war machine, a Canadian who volunteered to fight in the American forces during the Vietnam war and became a trained sniper and assassin during and after the conflict. Kick is “Canadian born and American made,” and he is a fearsomely effective killing machine.
But another sense of the phrase haunts the book. Although Kick is still connected to the shadowy world of spies, assassination and intrigue, he has become obsessed with and angered by another war machine, the one another chastened warrior, Dwight Eisenhower, called the “military industrial complex.” Although Kick is by no means a hippy or a peacenik, and he harbours a contempt for the American war resisters he calls “draft dodgers,” he is angry to have learned that the Canadian government and industries profited substantially from the Vietnam war and sometimes colluded with the American side while preserving a public appearance of neutrality and innocence.
Unsurprisingly, this book is cinematic in its propulsive action and tensions. It seems made to order for transfer to the screen. Think John Wick does Vancouver.
Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at [email protected]