My chemical romance
There’s very little that’s compelling in Stephenie Meyer’s latest novel
Quick: What sounds worse than a knock-off Jason Bourne novel with all the excitement and unpredictability removed? If you guessed “a boring knock-off Jason Bourne novel that is actually an awkward and unbelievable romance,” then you’ve probably already read “The Chemist,” the second adult novel by Stephenie Meyer, better known as the author of the “Twilight” YA series.
Erroneously described on the book jacket as “a gripping pageturner,” “The Chemist” takes all of the familiar spy thriller tropes — a government agent-turned-fugitive, an ill-advised romance, doublecrosses, corruption that goes all the way to the top (does it ever just go to the middle?) — and combines them into a tasteless mélange that is both difficult to care about and easy to forget.
The protagonist, mostly known as Alex, is an ex-government employee who specialized in creating the chemicals used in super-secret interrogations, earning her the nickname “The Chemist.” As is the plight of so many employees of Shadowy Government Agencies, she became a liability to her employers, but she managed to escape before they could catch her. Now she’s on the run.
Yet, in a turn of events that anybody who has seen a movie could foresee, her old employers have reached out to ask for her help in a case that could mean life or death for millions of people. Is it a trap? Will Alex manage to escape? Will she somehow manage to outsmart countless numbers of agents, presumably employed specifically to kill people, with some college-level chemistry?
“The Chemist” doesn’t commit any particular crimes against the basic spy narrative; it’s no more ludicrous than most Bond movies. But while the Bond movies can fall back on visual effects and beautiful people, it’s up to the author to create a compelling portrait of someone who is genuinely fighting for his or her life.
As a result, the ham-fisted romance between the heroine and— gasp! — the man she was tasked to torture brings more baggage to “The Chemist.” It asks a lot of questions of the reader, such as “How is this man even speaking to someone who just tortured him for no reason, much less falling in love with her?” Or “Why does she keep referring to how ‘pure’ this guy is? Isn’t that a thing we say about infants?” Or “How does this novel contain murders and assassinations, but the sexiest it dares to get is ‘Fabric tore, and she couldn’t guess who it belonged to’?”
Despite the somewhat lazy plotting and the eye-rolling nature of the romance, “The Chemist” could still work if it moved at any speed. Instead, Ms. Meyer writes for 20 pages before there’s any dialogue. Between exhaustive explanations of booby traps and the tendency to over-describe every single thing the heroine does — nothing is ever accomplished without a few sentences explaining exactly how The Chemist feels about doing it — the narrative repeatedly loses steam. Twists are spelled out immediately, no one ever truly seems to be in danger, and the hand-holding, hair-twirling relationship eventually becomes the center of the novel, all of which coincide to slow the story to a halt.
A thriller should be the perfect escape from a boring day at work or an ideal companion on a lazy afternoon. You should lose yourself in the twists and turns of global espionage and be pulled along by the breakneck pace carefully woven by a skilled author.
You could also try to lose yourself in a book that never uses a pronoun instead of a character’s name if it can help it, where a major political figure is fatally poisoned by the protagonist and is then given four sentences to contemplate it (including the deliciously unaware “This all feels anticlimactic”), and where sex is heavily implied yet squeamishly written. However, Ms. Meyer herself provides better recommendations with the book’s dedication “to Jason Bourne and Aaron Cross” — my advice is to read those books instead.