After America

By John Birmingham

After several 'worthy' books, some trash thriller. Sequel to the slightly better 'Without Warning' which I read last year and needs to be explained for this to make any sense at all.
There is a rather idiotic dream possessed of some Guardian readers that the world would be a better place without the USA, or slightly less stupidly, without George W. Bush. In WW something weird and still unexplained happens, and the inhabitents of the continental USA vanish in a shimmering energy field on the eve of the Iraq invasion.
Distressingly for Guardian readers, the world does not become a better place. Israel using a fair portion of it's nuclear arsenal on it's neighbours before they can overrun it makes sense. The French banlieu riots of XXXX developing into a full scale civil war less so. And then, nine months later, the energy field vanishes. That's the first book.
Where the focus of WW is international, AA is largely concerned with the attempts to recolonise the mainland USA. There are American survivors, trying to rebuild and reassert their nations authority, a cowboy plot, a spy story, a military story which grows to consume much of the second half of the novel. It makes reasonable sense and is an OK page turner, but hardly great literature.
The disappointing thing is the degree to which nothing gets resolved. While the first book obviously set up a sequel, this is really only the first half of that sequel. Still, it's an effective page turner. I'll not be rushing to get hold of the third book, but I expect I'll pick it up sooner or later.