38. Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorpe

Some of you may already recognize the title.  It is the 1979 book upon which Die Hard is based.  I've read several good recommendations for it and have been looking for it for a while. I found this uninspiring trade paperback in San Jose, CA while waiting for a tour of The Winchester Mystery House (very touristy but worth it) and since a better version seems very hard to find, I picked it up.

It's very hard to read and discuss this book without thinking about the movie.  The film deserves its reputation as an all-time great.  I've seen it many times and hope to take my child to see it when she is old enough to appreciate it (it's playing at the Cinématheque Québecoise on August 15, but we will be away).  Furthermore, it's hard to write about the book without giving away spoilers as part of the fun for reading it is to see how it differs from the movie.  I'll do a separate spoiler section at the end.  Read at your peril.

The premise here is a great one.  Joe Leland is on his way from New York to visit his now successful upcoming executive daughter in LA for xmas.  He is an ex-cop, ex-private detective and now a very high-level security consultant on terrorism.  He sees her only briefly at her office xmas party where they are celebrating the closing of a big business deal before the place is taken over by terrorists.  Leland who was in the bathroom is able to sneak off and spends the rest of the book wrecking the terrorists' plans while trying to save his daughter and grandchildren.  This is all seen through Leland's eyes and brain and as the action is going on, he is reminiscing through all the ups and downs (mostly downs) of his own life: his descent into alcoholism, his divorce and how it messed up his daughter, his fears about the brutality of a military response and on the positive side, the stewardess that he really vibed with on the plane (and whose number he has).

The biggest difference between Nothing Last Forever and Die Hard is that the book is much more firmly set in the 1970s worldview.  It's really about the conservative reaction to the extremist counterculture that came out of the 60s.  The big twist in the movie is that the terrorists are pretending to be supporting some vague leftist cause but are really just there to steal the money, which is an extremely 80s motif (and came to be the main idea in most of the Die Hard sequels and basically the motivation for almost all big bad guy movies since).  Leland is killing educated, upper middle-class euro-revolutionaries and kind of ambivalent about it.  The actions in the book lean right, but his thoughts are pretty balanced.  He just wants to survive and in the end, the corporation comes off as guilty if not worse than the terrorists. It's an interesting read from that perspective (though again hard to parse with the movie so dominant in mind).  I really need to read The Detective, the prequel to this one (which was also made into a movie with Frank Sinatra).

Themes and politics aside, it's a really fun read. The action is tight and you feel the pain and filth of Leland as he gets more and more messed up.  Some of the more elaborate physical situations, like him tying the firehose around himself and jumping off the roof get a bit unclear in my mind but this is probably due to my own laziness.  You can see why it got made into a movie.  It is kinetic as hell and almost all of it takes place in its own limited space.  The side characters are good too, though the movie does a great job of making them even more fun.  It also has a grim humour in it, though overall the tone is much darker than the movie.  I would have really liked this book even if Die Hard had never been made (though thank The Gods that it was).

 

 

 

SPOILER STUFF

 

 

 

 

The biggest difference between the movie and the book is that it is his daughter that he is going to visit (his divorced wife died in a car accident).  At first this seems like a smaller detail and we won't get the reconciliation from the movie, but as we get to the end, it becomes thematically a much bigger deal.  The daughter always had a wild side and in the book she is dating her boss, Ellis, the arrogant cokehead.  We learn that the big business deal was super shady, ostensibly to build a bridge in Chile, but it turns out also to sell arms to the repressive Pinochet regime (this is the reason the terrorists are going after the money, to give back to the Chilean people or something).  And Leland is critical of his daughter's involvement in this as he realizes what is going on.  She in effect becomes the sinner as much as the terrorists and suffers the same fate.  Yes, it's quite a brutal ending, though in its own dark way ending with a weird kind of family resolution with a suggestion that Leland will get with the nice stewardess and they will adopt the grandchildren.  His family state is restored.