Title: Find Virgil
Author: Frank Freudberg
Publisher: Inside Job Media
Pages: 356
The author seeks to imbue the story with an aura of realism
by setting the period during which the events of the book began – 1995, the
same year in which OJ Simpson was convicted, Forrest Gump won Best Picture at
the Academy Awards and Clinton was President.
Amid these real events is the fictional occurrence of
journalist Martin Muntor being diagnosed with lung cancer. The illness comes as
a shock to him because Muntor has never abused his body in any way. He has
always treated it like a temple, eating right, keeping fit, working hard, going
to church, and looking after his family. Yet in his illness, he is unemployed
and alone, with just one year of life left in him.
The realization that passive smoking has driven him to this
fills him with a rage against tobacco companies and smokers. Muntor decides to
exact a unique form of revenge where he takes with him those who actually
deserve to die.
Despite the pain he suffers, he takes the trouble to put
together 6 large cardboard boxes with 700 Fedex envelopes inside. Each envelope
contains a pack of 10 cigarettes, made up of a toxic mixture that ensures death
within seconds of the first smoke. The wages of sin are death, Muntor believes,
and he is ready to dole out that death himself.
Muntor fancies himself to be Christ, unbroken yet forced to
atone for the sins of the world. Yet he is also crazy with a distorted,
aggravated view of himself, as seen in the self-documentary he chooses to film
to leave his story behind for posterity.
In W Nicholas Pratt, the President and and COO of Old
Carolina Tobacco Inc, the world’s fourth largest cigarette company, Muntor has
a formidable enemy. Pratt is a ruthless man who thinks nothing of increasing
the nicotine content in cigarettes to get smokers addicted. Pratt ropes in Tom
Rhoads, an ex-cop, currently a private eye, to find out the identity of the man
who is wreaking vengeance on the tobacco industry.
Meanwhile, the police,
already intrigued by the disappearance of another accused in the company, make
their own attempts to figure out the identity of the vigilante, who has nicknamed himself Virgil.
In between there are a host of characters, each with his or
her own axe to grind. Some of them unnecessarily steal the spotlight from the
main characters and that is annoying.
In the tradition of troubled heroes, Rhoads has his own
drama raging on in his personal life, with his brother’s inability to stay
sober, and that is what makes him more willing to accept Pratt’s offer, even
though he and Pratt distrust each other.
Meanwhile, Muntor intensifies his terrorising activity
against the tobacco industry. He claims that he will not stop until he has
reminded the world about the evil of smoking. He will give up only if the
cigarette companies donate $1.5 billion to research.
Before long, the police and the FBI, Pratt, Rhoads and Muntor find themselves in a race to outwit each other, as they attempt to bring down
Virgil.
The name, Virgil, that Muntor assumes for himself, in his
conversations with the police, and with Rhoads, who he insists on speaking to,
comes from the Roman poet Virgil, who was also a character in Dante’s The
Divine Comedy. I found this element particularly appealing. I love literary references, and I loved the fact that Freudberg got this part right.
Another inconsistency is that while Muntor sends out a
letter to 700 smokers in the name of Matthew Doran, some chapters later, we have
Pratt stating that it is Tom’s name on the letter.
This book could have gained so much from the services of a
good editor. There are so many errors that could have been checked. For instance,
in one chapter, Dr Trice is said to have hurried on her short legs to the
restaurant. Why the derogatory reference to short legs?
Some of the chapters were far too short to be considered
chapters. Chapter 56, for example, is just 42 words long.It didn’t feel good to have my attention uprooted and shifted to a
different character just after a few paragraphs.
While the plot piques our interest, the writing is far from
compelling. There are only a few notable exceptions when the writing rises
above the general. Of these I can recall, The corpses of things he had begun
and later abandoned cluttered his life the way trash blows down dead-end alleys
and stays there.
But I overlooked all that in favour of the pace of this
thriller, and how Freudberg kept me engaged with the desire to know what
happens next.
The character of Tom Rhoads did not come out to be quite the hero that Freudberg portrayed him as. But Muntor was an unexpected anti-hero. I found myself rooting for him, in spite of the crazy narcissistic self-documentary filming. After all, his intentions were good, even if the means he used weren't.
The one thing I could not overlook, make that -- would not
overlook, was the on-off romance between Tom and Mary Dallaness, an employee of
Old Carolina. Mary was one of the most insipid women I’ve ever met in a book,
and it was hard to believe that she had a hold on the romantic affections of a
man like Tom, who was every bit her polar opposite. Also, her refusal to
believe anything negative about the tobacco industry, insisting that it created
jobs for ordinary people, irritated me so much, I longed to smack her hard
across the face.
All in all, there was a lot of promise in this book, which
could have been brought out in the hands of a good editor. The best feature of the book is that it confronts us with facts that I, as a non-smoker, felt terrified by. If these facts can terrify smokers into giving up smoking by bringing them face to face with some of the most insidious secrets of the tobacco industry and the nefarious tactics adopted by them to keep smokers hooked, it will be worth the effort.
That alone deserves a keen reading.