Never, Ken Follett, 2021

Rating: 3/5

Never is an epic story covering political events in the US, China, the Koreas, Chad and Syria, that inexorably spiral into a possible nuclear conflict. It details how a relatively small event in a remote part of the world could force the superpowers to get involved and how the compulsions of international relationships could actually end up escalating the conflict rather than ameliorating it. A scary possibility, and more so with the enhanced threats of cyber warfare now (interestingly documented in Nicole Perlroth’s “This is how they tell me the world ends” — my review here)!

However, what could have been a compelling political thriller becomes a mishmash of government manoeuvres and personal stories of some of the protagonists. The 800-page length consequently seems unnecessary — the entire track covering an undercover CIA agent in Chad and a mother-son duo from one of the Chadian settlements seems irrelevant and has very little bearing on the main plot, for example. Some of the personal side-stories are somewhat jarring and long, like the ones covering the lives of US President Pauline Green and her husband and daughter or even the relationship between a CIA operative and a French attache in Chad. The romantic tracks are awkward at best — when one of the key protagonists voices that “a woman’s heart can be an unexploded bomb … handle me delicately so that I don’t detonate”, you know that this isn’t Follett at his best. Foes of some of the main characters are reduced to caricatures. In a way, Never reminded me of the old Sidney Sheldon books — I would gobble them greedily when I was younger but would probably get nauseous reading parts of them now.

Given its length, the book is mercifully an easy read. However, only parts of it are real page-turners such as an escape from a terrorist camp or the spiralling of events towards the end. While I wasn’t tempted to leave the book unfinished at any point, Never was a bit of a lost opportunity to be a great book, in my view.

Pros: Epic story, easy read

Cons: Unnecessary length, awkward personal tracks