Review: A SOVEREIGN NATION

A SOVEREIGN NATION by DA Crossman (2017)

Reviewed by Peter Thomas

Wellington, New Zealand, 2023. Tensions are escalating in the South Pacific and the latest global financial crisis has brought New Zealand to its knees. From his Bee Hive office on the ninth floor, Prime Minister Michael Armstrong plays a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

This novel is futuristic and set in New Zealand. I thought the title of the book was most appropriate. The word sovereign implies the nation is autonomous under a supreme ruler acting independently without outside interference. In the context of the novel the title is ironic, emphasised by the sentence, “We are at the mercy of the precipitous and the reckless.”

The story contains many duplicitous characters but I felt I never got to know many of them, in much the same way as most of us never get to know those in power and those whose fingers, but not their fingerprints, are in the political plot.

From the point of view of a novel I felt I would have liked to have known the characters better. There were a large number of them and I needed to go back and re-read sections to mentally reposition names and characters.

The story concerns the political intrigues, power play and murders taking place behind the headlines in a nation on the brink of insolvency. It is set in the year 2023, which is within the foreseeable future. A novel, by its nature is fiction and does not have to be a prediction of future events. But I had difficulty extrapolating the New Zealand I know to the vision the author portrayed about five years into the future.

I noticed the occasional grammatical error but it was not enough to detract from the flow of the story. The occasional use of the “f” word could potentially upset some oversensitive readers.

The book would appeal to those interested in political shenanigans. The print version is perfect bound and well presented with an appropriate cover.

This review was first published in FlaxFlower reviews, which focuses on in-depth reviews of New Zealand books of all kinds, and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Flaxflower founder and editor Bronwyn Elsmore.