- Rawles, James Wesley.
Liberators.
New York: Dutton, 2014.
ISBN 978-0-525-95391-3.
-
This novel is the fifth in the series which began with
Patriots (December 2008),
then continued with
Survivors (January 2012),
Founders (October 2012),
and
Expatriates (October 2013),
These books are not a conventional multi-volume narrative, in
that all describe events in the lives of their characters in
roughly the same time period surrounding “the
Crunch”—a grid down societal collapse due to a debt
crisis and hyperinflation. Taking place at the same time,
you can read these books in any order, but if you haven't
read the earlier novels you'll miss much of the back-story of
the characters who appear here, which informs the parts they
play in this episode.
Here the story cuts back and forth between the United States,
where Megan LaCroix and her sister Malorie live on a farm in West
Virginia with Megan's two boys, and Joshua Kim works in security
at the National Security Agency where Megan is
an analyst. When the Crunch hits, Joshua and the LaCroix sisters
decide to team up to bug out to Joshua's childhood friend's
place in Kentucky, where survival from the urban Golden Horde
may be better assured. They confront the realities of a
collapsing society, where the rule of law is supplanted by
extractive tyrannies, and are forced to over-winter in a
wilderness, living by their wits and modest preparations.
In Western Canada, the immediate impact of the Crunch was less
severe because electrical power, largely hydroelectric,
remained on. At the McGregor Ranch, in inland
British Columbia (a harsh, northern continental climate
nothing like that of Vancouver), the family and those who have
taken refuge with them ride out the initial crisis only to
be confronted with an occupation of Canada by a nominally
United Nations force called UNPROFOR, which is effectively a
French colonial force which, in alliance with effete urban
eastern and francophone Canada, seeks to put down the fractious
westerners and control the resource-rich land they inhabit.
This leads to an asymmetrical war of resistance, aided by the fact
that when earlier faced with draconian gun registration and
prohibition laws imposed by easterners, a large number of
weapons in the west simply vanished, only to reappear when they
were needed most. As was demonstrated in Vietnam and
Algeria, French occupation forces can be tenacious and
brutal, but are ultimately no match for an indigenous insurgency
with the support of the local populace. A series of bold strikes
against UNPROFOR assets eventually turns the tide.
But just when Canada seems ready to follow the U.S. out of the
grip of tyranny, an emboldened China, already on the march
in Africa, makes a move to seize western Canada's abundant
natural resources. Under the cover of a UN resolution, a
massive Chinese force, with armour and air support, occupies
the western provinces. This is an adversary of an entirely
different order than the French, and will require the resistance,
supported by allies from the liberation struggle in the U.S.,
to audacious and heroic exploits, including one of the greatest
acts of monkey-wrenching ever described in a thriller.
As this story has developed over the five novels, the author
has matured into a first-rate thriller novelist. There is still
plenty of information on gear, tactics, intelligence
operations, and security, but the characters are interesting,
well-developed, and the action scenes both plausible and
exciting. In the present book, we encounter many characters we've
met in previous volumes, with their paths crossing
as events unfold. There is no triumphalism or glossing over the
realities of insurgent warfare against a tyrannical occupying
force. There is a great deal of misery and hardship, and
sometimes tragedy can result when you've taken every precaution,
made no mistake, but simply run out of luck.
Taken together, these five novels are an epic saga of survival
in hard and brutal times, painted on a global canvas. Reading
them, you will not only be inspired that you and your loved ones
can survive such a breakdown in the current economic
and social order, but you will also learn a great deal of the
details of how to do so. This is not a survival manual, but
attentive readers will find many things to research further for
their own preparations for an uncertain future. An excellent
place to begin that research is the author's own
survivalblog.com Web site,
whose massive archives you can spend months exploring.
November 2014 