Critique: Bloodline (James Rollins)

I wanted to read a book in which crime investigations were the main focuses; even when reading best sellers I was thoroughly bored. I don’t want to see consistent editorial errors and (more importantly for the crime genre) I don’t want to predict correctly ‘who done it’ and why within the first two chapters. This one, full of interesting plot points and ample surprises/suspense, was the first that was worth writing a review about.

***SPOILERS***

Plot

The novel is in a series about Gray who leads a Sigma field team, a fictional USA agency. Whilst their main purpose is to investigate syndicates like the Guild, in this novel they’re tasked in rescuing Amanda (the president’s daughter) from pirates.

Sigma’s leader Painter dates Dr Lisa. This fact would be insignificant if not for the fact that Lisa isn’t part of Sigma. Yet somehow she’s authorised to go into the field (and on a dangerous mission at that). Another problem is that Painter and Lisa can discuss confidential and secretive information: if she’s not part of the agency (especially an agency secret even to government officials) then how does she have the clearance to know sensitive topics?

Gray’s team is joined by Tucker and his dog Kane. It’s revealed that Kane is the rank above Tucker and that it’s always the case so that abusing dogs (like abusing any superior officer) is a court martial offence. I don’t know if that’s true in our world but either way it’s a lovely thought.

Near the end, the Bloodline (who run the Guild) captured Gray to kill the President. This is followed by an explanation as to why, adding that it would lead to Sigma’s dismantlement. But why would you share your master plan with your enemy, especially when it’s information that will make them resist co-operation? Sure, it was ingenious and enjoyable to know the plan but I don’t think the information was presented quite right. Seeing as we have perspective points from the Bloodline from start to end, maybe it should have been discussed then.

 On this mission, Gray and his team bump into an Indian member of the UK’s Sigma equivalent.

This individual’s family name is ‘Jain’ and this is an awful choice. Jains follow Jainism, a religion of extreme non-violence (and my favourite religion). Jains even avoid eating root vegetables because they need to die to be eaten. If they treat plants this well, they certainly won’t fight a person. So choosing to call a fighter ‘Jain’ is disrespectful.

Gray originally thought Jain worked for the SIS which, apparently, is ‘sometimes referred to as MI6’. Now, being British and living in the UK, 99.9% of the time it’s called (by citizens, politicians and leaders of the agency alike) MI6. So writing that it’s ‘sometimes’ called MI6 is inaccurate.

It turns out that Amanda’s baby has a triple helix (the secret to eternal life). This is why the Bloodline wanted the baby. I’d been excited throughout the whole book to understand how the triple helix explained eternal life but it was… creatively faulty.

            At the start of the novel we see a female Templar take a bloodied staff from an immortal. A plant virus he caught gave him a triple helix that granted immortality by prevented cells from dying. The Bloodline used this to create a synthetic spiral called PNA (DNA but peptide).

            Unfortunately for the story, stopping cells from dying won’t prevent immortality. Aging (and death) are caused because telomeres overtime don’t protect DNA from damage when they replicate in order to replenish worn out cells. If cells didn’t die, things like blood clots, tumours and cancer would become bigger because the body couldn’t get rid of them. This would cause millions more deaths.

Technicalities

I was irked by the ‘giant hybrid of Turritopsis nutricula’.

A hybrid is, by definition, a product of two different species. A hybrid neither belongs to either parent species nor does it qualify as its own species. Hybrids thus cannot have their own Latin species name.

The Latin name of a hybrid is the Latin names of its parents combined with an X (for example, a liger is Panthera leo X Panthera tigris). By giving a life form one species name, it’s an acknowledgement that the life form is its own species.

If it’s its own species then it parents have to belong to the same species and therefore it cannot be a hybrid. So yes, irksome.

There were a few small things I found that were hopefully lapses in editorial oversight rather than conscious choices made by the author.

Someone mentions that they studied at ‘the University of Tokyo and Oxford’, written as if it’s one university. Whilst it doesn’t exist in real life, there’s no reason why it couldn’t. Although, I do get the feeling that the two separate universities were meant here by the author, so ‘University’ would have to be ‘Universities’.

At one point, ‘bra and panties’ were mentioned. Seeing as ‘panties’ is something a toddler would say, I was surprised to see an adult say/think that phrase in an adult book.

Another quotation that puzzled me was ‘vanished the barest rustle of leaf’. Missing ‘with’ in between ‘vanished’ and ‘the’ is a bit of an oversight. But then we have the ending: if one leaf was meant, ‘of a leaf’ would have been better but if multiple leaves were meant, then ‘leaves’ should have been written.

The author uses ‘dialect’ a lot but he neither names it nor describes how the dialect sounds. Hence I fail to see the point of stating that a dialect is being used. If the author had written ‘language’ instead of ‘dialect’, it would have made more sense. Dialects are, after all, variants within a language, so if the characters can’t understand the language, there’s no hope of them recognising and distinguishing between the language’s dialects.

Considering America’s anti-nepotism laws, how the President of the United States installed his brother as Secretary of State is beyond me.

On lucky occasions we went saw the story through Kane’s perspective. This was executed with precision. There was only one problem: Kane’s perspective was in the present tense even though the other perspectives were in the past tense. Dogs can distinguish past, present and future every time they smell something so they understand chronology. They don’t just experience the present. People, on the other hand, can only see/hear/touch the present. I respect the author making an effort to distinguish a dog’s perspective from those of the humans but the methods did nothing for me.

Final Notes

There’s plenty to enjoy in this novel and I’m glad to have read it. Some things caught me off guard but nothing was abhorrent. Easily missed slipups and not having years of education on specialist topics are understandable. The plot was strong, as were many characters. There were many perspectives yet this didn’t cause confusion. After so many awful crime novels, ‘Bloodline’ finally gave me hope for the genre.