You can force many things in life, but you can’t force anything to come to mind. Seen in this way, every fiction also tells something about the people who made it up. That’s exactly why you read a detective novel written by a former US Secretary of State – to compare history with reality. That is why Hillary Clinton’s “State of Terror” was written with the help of the writer Louise Penny. Once the heroine, the newly minted American Secretary of State Ellen Adams, has to fly to Frankfurt, where there was an assassination attempt and her son was injured, and wants to ask the unspecified German Chancellor for help. Her boss, President Doug Williams, has doubts, and then Ellen Adams hurls at him: “She’s a person, you should try too.” The only real German Chancellor to date can feel a little flattered.
Some of the references are heartbreaking. The best friend of the former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a woman who had accompanied her since elementary school, was Betsy Ebeling, who died in 2019 – and that one of the central figures in “State of Terror”, Betsy Jameson, has been a friend of the fictional US Secretary of State Ellen Adams since Elementary school days, inspired by her, is even in the book’s Acknowledgments. Others are, how should you put it, not surprisingly. There is, for example, the newly-fired predecessor in office of Doug Williams, a fool named Dunn, who has tailored his Middle East policy to his own interests. All similarities with living people are of course purely coincidental.
The research shows that there is a connection to the White House
“State of Terror” is a fiction overall. Ellen Adams is not a lawyer, she is widowed and a career changer in politics. The plot, however, is shockingly current. An employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has received an email with numbers and it turns out – unfortunately too late – that the bus routes and times are the ones that announce bomb attacks. It has something to do with the research that Gil, the Foreign Minister’s son, is currently working on – he is a journalist, she herself previously ran a media company. She thinks she knows the sinister figure behind it, Bashir Shah, a Pakistani arms dealer. The more she learns about the background, the clearer it becomes that there is a connection to the White House.
She didn’t write that alone. Like Bill Clinton before her, who co-wrote James Patterson for “The President is Missing” (2018), she has also brought in an accomplished specialist: Louise Penny, creator of Inspector Armand, who is now also known in Germany Gamache, who has been carefully investigating Québec, Canada for seventeen volumes. He regularly gets into ethical trouble, but in the end Penny likes to lead her stories back to the idyll of his home village Three Pines – and that is precisely why they liked Hillary Clinton, who began to read them when she retired after the lost presidential candidacy in 2016 .
Hillary Clinton: State of Terror, from the American by Sybille Uplegger, Harper Collins, 560 pages, 24 euros, also available as an e-book.
“State of Terror” is a bit long, but very gripping, and the story becomes all the more interesting because you sometimes overhear the real ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – she actually warned about what would happen in Afghanistan if troops were withdrawn, as she puts it in Ellen Adams’ mouth, the macho attitudes of the Russian president pearled off her and the question at the core of this is – what will happen on the world stage if the US leaves a power vacuum? – it really turns out.
Nevertheless, “State of Terror”, measured against one of Penny’s Gamache novels, is only a very small light of joy. who took it under the nail. But it may also have a vain aftertaste that Bill Clinton’s crime digression could not get rid of: that a myth of the Clintons as saviors of at least America, if not the whole of the West, is being fueled here. And at least one can argue about this myth. Armand Gamache, in comparison to Ellen Adams more of a criminal allotment gardener, actually shows up at the end – but the threat that State of Terror has built up is so realistic that even that is no consolation.