An Elephant on Your Nose: review

With Reed's descriptions of technical operations throughout the novel, he indirectly informs the reader that not everything done within the intelligence world is within the law. Reed leaves it to the reader to speculate on the morality of this when such operations potentially prevent mega-disasters such as terrorism's worst nightmare, a nuclear attack. There is no moralizing in this novel.

Reed makes a subliminal point about declining US influence in East Asia. The whole story is about the rising cooperation between East Asian states with the exclusion of the United States.

The message for Australia is that Beijing is closer to us than Washington and has much more relevancy to our daily lives. The Chinese re-emergence is vastly different than the rise of the US. China is able to spread its influence across the region without the need to show military supremacy. China's prime strategies to garner influence are non-military.

If I had to make any criticism about the book, perhaps the author could have elaborated a little more on the major players when each character came into the story. However, this may have disrupted the momentum Reed had going in his narrative. The letter from Bella to Li at the end of the book went a long way in retrospectively filling in these gaps. However, it also served to show that the main players were actually lonely people who paid for their professional success with unfulfilled personal lives.

Probably the main theme of Reed's book was about the need for cooperation at two levels. Firstly, cooperation between people with different disciplinary backgrounds, from different walks of life. This brings a synergy in making deductions from clues when seen from different perspectives. Secondly, cooperation between different agencies at the inter-organizational level allows for the pooling of both intelligence and analytical resources to detect terrorist cells which operate across national borders.

Reed believes that in today's technology rich environment, human judgements, most often made under stress and pressure is what matters. This is particularly important when agencies in the future will face more and more unprecedented incidents.

Hard work, dedication, and personal sacrifice are the most important personal qualities an intelligence operative requires. This is probably introspective of Reed.

Finally, Reed tells us that to understand the big picture, we must understand history. Today's events come out of history. History to some extent influences particular actions and behaviour. Good analysis demands understanding the stories behind the story.

An Elephant on Your Nose goes further than presenting an entertaining narrative, its also a commentary about new realties, done in fable form, of which Reed is a master.

A complex plot with lots of twists, yet easy and very enjoyable to read.