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The Feather Men

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In that respect, the film is a complete turnaround of the book, where the villains are made to appear righteous.

Once I’d grasped the plot, I surprised myself in realising that I had actually begun to rather enjoy it; that is if a reader, who in this situation is essentially a voyeur, can actually claim to be favorably interested in seedy sex, brutal violence and carefully calculated cold blooded killing. He reaffirmed that he had the signed permission of the soldiers' families, including Kealy's wife, to mention them in the book. I came to my own conclusion that I don't feel you can have a retribution killing for something that happens in a war or military encounter, especially when the person being hunted down and killed later wasn't even the aggressor. Fiennes has written books about his army service and his expeditions as well as a book defending Robert Falcon Scott from modern revisionists. Only when Danny provides proof of their execution - which must be made to appear accidental - and a taped confession of their guilt, will Hunter be released.For better or worse, I almost never read a book without finding out what it's about, but I do wish I hadn't read the foreword until I'd gotten into the story. It was written like a non-fiction work (every acronym or slightly unusual word was then explained in brackets, frequently quite unnecessarily), and the "exciting" scenes were told in a completely matter-of-fact way, losing any sense of tension. But having passed that initial stage, I was soon captivated - both by the story itself, and by the wealth of detailed inside knowledge it reveals - of SAS actions and training, of a war in Oman I knew almost nothing about, of the mechanics of mounting assassinations so skilfully and stealthily as to make them appear to be accidents.

In June 2010, Alice Clarke, the daughter of SAS soldier Major Mike Kealy whose death is depicted in The Feather Men at the hands of The Clinic, spoke out, saying that her father had died during an endurance exercise in the Brecon Beacons in 1979.Having said that, as regards the Killer Elite, both the film and the book are well worth watching and reading. The story is intriguing - hired killers getting revenge for an Arab sheik by performing hits on the British SAS men who killed one or another of the sheik's 4 sons. How the hired killers went about their task (making each murder look like an accident), how they were finally apprehended and how this case in 1990 also put an end to the Committee--or so Fiennes ( Hell on Ice ) contends its members have assured him--makes for a highly suspenseful tale.

At the end of the book, Fiennes holds up his hands and justifies his use of his background knowledge and experience to ‘paint’ the scenes for which there was no primary (first-hand) source. From 1977 to 1990, three hired assassins known as the Clinic tracked down and murdered four former British soldiers, one at a time. Another thing worth noting too - in both cases - is the different treatment given to the story between the book and the film.I had heard of this book before I saw the film based on it but it was only after seeing the movie reently that I decided to read it. But, somehow, the uncertainty bred of where the boundary between reality and unreality lies, can, especially at a certain time of year, feel quite sickeningly worse. At times it feels too theatrical to be real, but then again much of the story is choppy, random, filled with holes, you don't get all the answers you want. In that respect, it reminded me of The Quiet American, by Graham Greene - set in Vietnam, during the first Indochina war in the early fifties. Readers will be given pause, however, by Fiennes's wont to romanticize vigilante justice and his assertion that for 20 years the British ``have had good reason to be grateful for the Feather Men's protective presence.

Ranulph Fiennes has published eight books, two of which have been in The Sunday Times bestseller list. I found this book in a NY Times book review section on mysteries and did not know it was about Oman, when I started to read it.

This was partly due to the writing style which I found flat and often uninteresting, and partly due to the fact that it didn't seem to know if it was a thriller or a non-fiction retelling of actual events. I also found that by watching the movie first, I had a better understanding of the depth of this novel. Faint tidemarks on the page edges not affecting the text and a bump on the rear board foredge else very good in a near fine dustwrapper with internal spotting. Now supposedly there was a secret British vigilante organization (the "Feather Men") looking out for the health, welfare and families of former SAS members. I had thought it would be a military history type of book and was surprised that it was a "fact or fiction" thriller/ actual event novel.

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