"Ghost", Again

[rowyn]

I finished Ghost. The third 'novella' of the book pretty much decided me against reading any more of the series.



Lut describes the protagonist of Ghost, Mike Jenkins, as "not a nice person". This is a massive understatement. Over the course of several hundred pages, the protagonist kills dozens of people -- some of whom are shot in the back as they're trying to flee -- and brutally tortures and maims others for information.

I didn't mention this the last time I wrote about this book. Not because those things hadn't happened yet -- they had -- but because I didn't care. It was like "True Lies": "They were all bad men." He was killing and torturing terrorists who were in the midst of very nasty plots, and I just didn't care what happened to them. Although, incidentally, there were only two instances of the torture/maiming that I can think of, and neither of them actually yielded accurate information. It's questionable whether they even yielded useful information.

But there is one point, in the first novella I think, where a woman asks Jenkins "Have you ever raped a woman?" And he answers with something like "I don't think any of the prostitutes in Eastern Europe actually have a choice. I try to remember that. It helps." The character he's talking to says "I'll give you a pass for that."

And my thought at the time was Uh ... I'm not sure I'm willing to give him a pass for that.

Jenkins is established early on as having "issues" with sex. He gets involved in the first story because the girl he's stalking gets kidnapped by someone else. But he's also established as drawing the line at anything non-consensual. The narrator decribes him as wanting to be a rapist, but never doing it. And very consciously refusing to do it: not a matter of "can't work himself up to it" or "scared to" or anything, but "It's wrong, and I may want to do it, but it's wrong and I won't."

And then, in the third novella, he does.

He goes to a brothel in Serbia and buys a day with a Russian prostitute whose age he estimates at 15-17, and who was probably kidnapped and sold into slavery to the pimp she's working for. Then, over the course of several pages that I mostly skimmed because they were too brutal and sadistic to read, he rapes her several times.

And I don't mean "it's rape because she's in slavery and cannot consent or refuse". I mean "it's rape because he's hitting her, yelling at her, and getting off on making each of several sexual acts as horrible for her as possible without inflicting permanent injury or scars". Let me emphasize: this was a really ugly scene. I have a fairly high tolerance for ugliness, and this exceeded it on the first page.

It made me hate the character.

Lut pointed out that his victim was an enslaved prostitute and she'd probably been through worse. Or would go through worse. In fact, Jenkins feels guilty over the experience and ends up going back to purchase her and set her free. Which he even does in a decent fashion -- ie, not "free in Serbia where she'll probably end up enslaved again", but to Paris, where he offers to take care of her, or she can leave if she wants. Rather sensibly IMO, she leaves. Because he may be a guilty asshole but he's still an asshole and what reason does she have to trust him?

And none of this changes what he did, which was rape a girl who had done nothing wrong except be available when he decided to rape someone.

And, yeah, maybe that's realistic, maybe that's what some men are like, maybe it's what a lot of men are like and the radical feminists are right, hell, I don't know except that I absolutely refuse to believe that any of my friends would do that kind of crap and it's damned insulting to imply that they would. Sure, lots of people have rape fantasies. I have rape fantasies. Hello! Fantasy != Reality. Fantasizing about something is Very Different from going out and doing it, and I think the vast majority of people with fantasies of doing unpleasant, unhealthy things have zero desire to make them into reality.

...

Anyway.

I don't know. I can't forgive the character for that scene. I don't want to read more stories about him putting down bad guys and saving the day. I don't want to root for him, even if the alternatives that he's stopping are so much worse.

I don't want to give him a pass.

I do want to give the author, John Ringo, credit for one thing: he didn't flinch. A lot of authors have protagonists who "did horrible things" but the authors never show the characters doing them. They flinch from showing the worst side of the character. The reader is left thinking "he's not THAT bad". Ringo hinted at what was to come with that early line about prostitutes. When the time came, he didn't flinch from showing exactly what he meant. (Actually, the scene is described as 'the worst he's ever treated a woman' so whatever things he got a pass on earlier was presumably not as bad. Though who knows how bad that is?)

Another thing that bugged me about this was that, in the second novella, there's this whole long development of what struck me as a healthy, affectionate, BDSM relationship. And the same character who brutalizes this poor kid in Serbia was at some pains to teach a couple of girls how to be safe and sane about their fantasies. Including his own. During this novella, he avoids prostitutes deliberately, and he even says at one point that "without love, it's meaningless" or something like that. Something to emphasize that you don't just use people to make them hurt and miserable to get your jollies.

And then he does exactly that.

It's just so ... ugly. Like it's even worse because you can tell he knows better, and he just doesn't care.

Ugh.

There's another question here, the question of what you do in the face of evil. And I don't know what I would do if Mike Jenkins were real. Because he endure a lot of hell to save a lot of people, and if he were a real person ... I don't know. Do you forgive your monsters for being monsters because they're yours? Does forty-nine girls from rape and death by torture excuse you from raping one yourself? How do you weigh the good against the evil?

I don't know. But Mike Jenkins isn't a real person, and I don't have to forgive him, or read more about him.


I didn't realize how much this was bugging me until I started writing about it. I hope the cut-tag and spoiler-warning doesn't put everyone off from reading the post.

Comments

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

It depends on the sin.

While it is true that being surrounded by brutality can make one brutal, it is also true that evil is evil regardless of who is doing it. If one guy kills a thousand innocents willingly, and the other guy kills only one innocent willingly, then they are both killers of innocent people. Only the scale changes.

Would I give the guy a pass for that? No, I would not. Just like I don't give a cop a pass on shooting unarmed people in their beds just because he got a bad tip or watched a Dirty Harry movie earlier. When the people fighting the monsters begin to turn into monsters themselves, it is time to rotate the lineup and let the monster turn back into a man again far from the front lines. Otherwise, the fight is lost.

Heroes are heroes because they are strong enough to fight and resist becoming that which they fight. Those who fall are corrupted by the soul-rot they confronted daily and are Fallen Heroes. And the main difference between the fallen hero and the moster is that the fallen hero chooses the path with full knowledge and consent. So of the two, the fallen is the more damned in my book.

[ceruleanst.livejournal.com]

I find this is a typical concept of redemption for conservative writers. You're expected to weigh the good against the bad quantitatively and take away the message that saving lives is worth a few rapes even if there's no causal relationship between them but the existence of the person who did both. Is it meant to leave you with questions (as it should)? Not really. It's meant to act out the author's and readers' fantasy of being a hero. For certain people, a big part of the fantasy of being a hero is being entitled (by a sort of virtue surplus) to indulge in horrible acts.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

*hugs the Rowyn* And yeah... I'd rather read about Miles Vorkosigan.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Heh, that's a neat term, 'virtue surplus'.

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

I think some of these authors need to eventually realize that the stuff in their navel is just garden-variety lint.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

So many things I'm not sure where to start where I don't know what to say.

I appreciate that the author did a good job portraying an evil person. Sometimes I want to see a character I hate, that I don't believe is 'right' and that I don't have to feel sympathy for. Character development-wise, it's very interesting. It's the sort of thing Darth Vader should have had. The question, "what makes a mature man who knows better, suddenly choose evil" is quite an interesting one - which unfortunately Lucas ruined by turning into a slightly delayed teenage rebellion thing. So, he should 'redeem' himself by getting heroically killed off. I'd find it sort of 'acceptable' if that event was a flashback, and the earlier and current books were basically to be read as an extended suicide effort against people worse than he is. Suicide-by-terrorist, except he hasn't run into one competent enough to kill him off yet - that makes a great motivation for a character.

I'm glad the girl ran, because I don't like anything that has the 'we can all have a happy little rape-tainted relationship' message. Like you said, Fantasy, !Reality.

And yeah, there's that 'our guy-ism' aspect I don't like either. That no matter what, the alternative is worse, so let's pick the lesser of two evils. As if good never enters the question, as if the guy is successful simply because he's willing to go to the wall.

John Ringo... I need to check something, that name is familiar and I don't think because I heard you mention it before.

[tetsujinnooni.livejournal.com]

Harmon is definitely "not a nice guy" on a no-shit-that's-an-understatement scale... It seems he spends a certain amount of time trying to ACT like a nice guy, because he seems to think being a nice guy is overall better than who he thinks he is.

Harmon, on a worth-writing-about-grade bad day? Slips his own leash. Crosses over the line (his own, even) into evil. OK, now what?

Unfortunately from a character development standpoint, John's muse hasn't seen fit to give us any of the (mostly internal?) path from fallen hero back to not-a-nice-guy-but-can-passably-fake-it-most-days. He seems to have traveled that path by the end of the five novel arc, but we don't see the path. (even more unfortunately, seeing the path would fail to fit the genre the books tend to fall within).

Ghost, aka the wanker book, is the lead in to some of John's best writing - Unto the Breech is a good justification for the character's existence, and nobody is trying to give him a pass on the Serbian now-ex-pros. IMO, none of the rest of the series is in the same league for either ugliness of bedroom antics, nor explicitness of bedroom antics.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

He wrote the There Will Be Dragons series I've been reading.

The good guys don't rape women in that one, at least.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

No, not the guy who wrote the one book I threw away in disgust.

However I hate him for using lines from Jabberwocky as book titles. Because now I want to read them, and I'm pretty sure it'll have characters just like the Ghost in them.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

Yeah... that was another one of the 'oh this looks interesting' titles I saw on his published list.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

I think Cerulean here put it perfectly, and I agree. Morality is not something that's measured like flour in a cup, or with points. If a person has a flaw or commits a crime, people have to either live with it or the person who commits it has to be penitant, wanting to change or make up for it. Even in the latter case, people have to be willing to forgive him... I guess as a conscious act of penitance with resolve to stay on the right path. Torturing the bad guys to death wasn't a good thing, but you were able to live with that. Raping the girl was terrible, and though he had a half-assed notion of penitance there, it wasn't enough to you, and you aren't obliged to forgive him based on that.

[rowyn]

No, I don't think so. I've read a bunch of Ringo books -- at least half a dozen from different series -- and the Ghost protagonist is easily the nastiest protagonist from any of them. No one else even comes close. The book's much more over-the-top in several ways than any of his other work.

I'd stand by recommending Ringo's work overall.

[rowyn]

Yeah, I should do a follow-up post to clarify that I'm not hating on John Ringo in general. This is the first book of his that I've read where one of his protagonists does something egregious. I haven't read everything that he's written, but I've read four or five Posleen books and three or four of the There Will Be Dragons novels, and they were all pretty good.

Lut did warn me that I might not like Ghost. He was right.

[minor-architect.livejournal.com]

I might be way off base here, but all of this nastiness sounds like the author is simply trying to get away with as much controversy as he can in the name of "realism." (Which is a term I don't like, by the way. It implies that your reality holds more truth than anyone else's. I prefer to call myself a "cynic," instead. ;-)

Either way, as right or wrong as I may be on this one, I won't be reading any of John Ringo's books anytime soon. Thanks for the heads-up.

[rowyn]

I don't think Ringo is that level of un-calculating; I suspect this was meant to leave me with questions, although perhaps not the conclusion that I came to.

But then again, I haven't encountered that kind of fantasy before. I've seen plenty of protagonists who do horrible things for the cause that are "okay because they did it to bad people". But not the virtue-surplus effect. O_o Ewwww.

[rowyn]

I don't know what I want the character to do. I don't know what would feel like enough.

I guess that's why I've never had a protagonist do things that bad without killing them in the end. Because I can't forgive them. I usually rescue them by not letting them do it.

What's enough? It's a good question.

[rowyn]

Thanks, Tufty. *hug* I should check for new Bujold books, I haven't seen a new one in a year or two. :)

[octantis.livejournal.com]

It's hard to say. You could kind of compare it to real life in a way... at what point does a person do something so awful that no amount of remorse or resolve to be better could warrant any trust of them anymore? At what point do they essentially sentance themselves to death? This fellow seems to have found the limit for you, and in doing so erased himself from your universe. Interesting.

[rowyn]

I'm not sure about "just as bad or worse" but it's not the sort of thing that's excusable. There is no virtue-surplus that grants someone the right to do evil. Brrr.

[rowyn]

That's what I was thinking about.

Because, in theory, I believe in redemption. I believe that even murderers and child abusers can repent and find forgiveness.

So there's got to be some way that it's possible to forgive this protagonist. I just don't know what it is.

Part of my reluctance to read further, though, is that the stories have an episodic, TV-serial quality. The events of the previous novellas have almost no bearing on subsequent ones, so far. So I feel (perhaps incorrectly) that this chapter in his life is done and the author isn't going to revisit again. I'm supposed to go back to rooting for him next episode just like nothing had happened.

And I don't want to root for him any more.

[rowyn]

I really need to do a "don't hate John Ringo" post. O_O No, really, I've read a bunch of his other books and they're good. With much, much less moral ambiguity.

[rowyn]

Hee!

In a way, this felt like a very uncontemplative book. Lots of action, lots of bad guys getting killed and good guys winning. Very much a fanfic sort of thing, you know what I mean? Like it was written more for self-gratification than to hold up as "The Truth", or even as particularly good fiction.

[rowyn]

Part of the problem is that he's not portrayed unsympathetically. I'm still rooting for him to win at the end, even with all he's done.

Which is what I hate, that I'm being manipulated to like a monster.

[rowyn]

Also: yes, I'd be more interested in a redemption story or suicide-by-terrorist story than in the "it's just something that happened, deal" which is what it felt like.

[rowyn]

I dunno that I'm interested in another 4 novels of "I'm evil on my bad days but the world would go down in flames without me, so be grateful".


...

Let me rephrase that: I *know* I'm not interested in that.

If there's more to it than that, I might give the series another shot. I'll talk to Lut about it.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

And less rape!

... not *much* less rape, though.

[minor-architect.livejournal.com]

Errrr...

You know this doesn't induce me to rush right out and buy his books, right?

O_O

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Well, the war against the posleen series may be entirely rape-free -- I can't think of any at least. Since it's all about evil alien velociraptors who harvest humans for meat.

There Will Be Dragons is humans vs humans in a post-apocalyptic setting, so...

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

My standards regarding forgiveness may be different for story characters than real-life people (or theoretical real-life people). In real life, I may have trouble "forgiving" someone (in terms of trust, that is), once he's crossed a certain line - because there are just certain things that you've either done or you haven't, and once you've done them, it indicates the possibility that you might do them again.

But in a story, everything is a construct of the author. In real life, the victim of a crime is really the one in the position to forgive the offender - but if it happens in a story, and it comes across as something too easy, I may look at it as a cheap construct to hand-wave off something truly despicable. There are certain things that I just cannot look at without looking at the "meta-game." If the author chooses to describe in intricate detail the violation of a minor - is this meant to inspire horror, to communicate just how awful such a thing is, or is this meant to entertain a voyeuristic reader? Am I a voyeuristic reader if I don't immediately put down the book or at least skip the chapter?

The fact that the story played out such a cruel episode rather than just telling us that it happened (and there can be a difference, even in a book) makes me wonder about the intent.

I think there might be a compelling story that could be told of a truly despicable character who nonetheless has redeeming qualities - or who seeks redemption - but I don't think I'd have the stomach to write such a story when the offenses pass a certain point, and I'm not really sure who I'd want my audience to be.

After all, there are many compelling stories to be told. Photography is seen as an art because the photographer chooses what to photograph and how to do it, even though the thing he has taken a picture of exists whether or not he was there to see it. Likewise, there is something to be said for what we dwell on. If I were to spend all my time "exposing" the reader to the imagined depravity of villains - and then tut-tutting that such horrors could exist - then ... well, it's really just exploitation. If I spend my time describing in great detail the offensive things I've seen or heard about, I don't know that I'm really doing anybody a service.

I sympathize on the point that sometimes there are stories where a character has done something bad "off camera" and we're just supposed to brush it off. It comes across as kind of cheap. But this swings in the other direction too far - it's on camera, and apparently we're supposed to brush it off, or else we wouldn't be buying and reading the next book in the series.

"I'll give you a pass on that." Bah. What a contrived setup. That's like the "noble" hero we know is noble simply because everybody around him says so or thinks so - so it simply must be true, even if we never actually see him do anything particularly noble. Hey, he did this despicable thing, but his relativistic argument earns him a pass because, hey, this other character says it's okay. Instant validation.

By the way - that "virtue surplus" concept is pretty scary.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

I definitely want to stay far away from the book, and I'm pretty tough to shock/squick too.

Tangentially related, didn't you mention a good BDSM sourcebook on your last post about these novellas? Can I be lazy and ask you to post the name again here? :-) (Um, no reason... *blush*)

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Virtue Surplus seems pretty sensible to me.

It's scary the way culture seems to be moving away from it -- people go to farther and farther lengths to bludgeon people with blame for the tiniest thing they do wrong, but there's no counterbalance where good deeds are repayed.

If you give food to a thousand starving people, and one of them gets sick because they were allergic, you're doomed. Or, your neighbors sue you because you reduced the value of their property by building an ugly addition, but they don't pay you if you increase the value of their property somehow.

It's totally out of whack, but in the opposite direction.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I think it might help if it were clearer that the writer sees the offense for what it is - not just a minor "bad boy" bit of naughtiness. The fact that there's another voice to "give him a pass" gives me concern. The fact that the victim decides to leave is at least hopeful - but I can't help but chalk that up to wiping off the slate (sorry for mangling metaphors) in time for the next episode. I haven't read the book, but I get the impression that there are no consequences, and even if the uncaring universe of this novel doesn't frown upon our "hero" for his transgression, there's no narrative voice making it clear that what he did was beyond merely "wrong." From what you've described, it really seems as if the author just sees this as a "rough edge" for a protagonist whose lapses in ethics are excused by his "heroic" actions.

It's not just a matter of "forgiving" the character - it's that the treatment of the offense and its aftermath says something about the universe the writer has created. I don't know if I'd be able to forgive the writer; it might happen again.

No, it probably WILL happen again, because this strikes me as the sort of genre where the writer wants to push boundaries and shock the audience and show that his hero is oh-so-gritty and oh-so-"real."

So, I'm totally with you on this one: I wouldn't want to root for him anymore, either.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Giving food to a thousand starving people and one of them getting allergic is a far cry from, let us say, giving food to a thousand starving people ... and raping or slaughtering one for kicks. What you've described as your example is bad luck or perhaps incompetence at worst. Calculated malice (calculated in the sense of "I've done my good deeds, so I'm allowed this bad one") is another matter entirely.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Which was the one book you threw away in disgust? (And who wrote it?) Just curious. (You might have mentioned it before, but no book titles have stuck in my head, alas.)

[rowyn]

It's Screw the Roses, Send Me the Thorns. And yes, it's a good book. Definitely recommended.

[ladyperegrine.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :-)

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I would have to do a re-read to be sure, but I think that the Looking Glass series is also rape-free. Unfortunately the war against the posleen series isn't completely rape free. If I recall correctly it is rape-free up to Cally's war.

Also with the exception of the Paladin of Shadows series (Ghost, Kildar, etc...) the rape is very clearly an evil act done by character that are either evil or at a bare minimum unsypathetic.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Actually it John ringo didn't even want it published. It was blocking his brain and preventing him from writing his contracted work until he wrote it down on paper. He then release a few snippets on Baen's Bar which then developed into a call to publish it. The other books in the series are better written and less morally ambiguous. They are still pretty ambiguous in some parts, but less so than Ghost. If you hadn't already read Ghost I would have recommended that you start anywhere else in the series and then backfill if you liked it.

Kildar, Choosers of the Slain, and Unto the Breach were included in the promo CD that was included with Unto the Breach. You can download or read them online for free and legally from Joe Buckley's site. If you decide to give the series another chance you can do that without necessarily supporting the books. If you decide that you don't want to give it a second chance that is also fair. there are plenty of good book and good authors out there, you don't have to read them all or read books you don't like.
http://baencd.thefifthimperium.com/11-UntotheBreachCD/UntotheBreachCD/

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

... thinking now his Amazon reviews should read:

"...And this novel is 95% rape free..."

Just being silly.

[koogrr.livejournal.com]

I don't remember.

I'd recognize the cover, but have forgotten the name and author.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Well, that's all right. It's only morbid curiosity on my part, anyway! >=) (It's that same sort of curiosity that leads me to read reviews of movies that I know are going to be really, really awful.)

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

Now, that'd be a back-handed "compliment" for sure. Sounds like fair warning, though.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Thinking over the series there I don't recall ANY characters like ghost in them. In fact that series is deliberately modeled off the Heinlen juveniles. Lots of hard science and blasting of evil ailiens, little to no romance, and substitute words for the bad language (grapp and maulk primarily).