We found them inspiring last Sunday at Everybody talks about it, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny, two fine flies hovering far from cobwebs. By videoconference, at the time of accompanying their thriller state of terror, in our bookstores this week in French version, they proved to be accomplices and laughing, relaxed, relevant, sure of themselves too. Great blow for TLMEP and much happiness for the congregation at home.
She will not have shattered the glass ceiling by becoming the first president of the United States, that Hillary. But how high she rose! First lady when her husband, Bill Clinton, ruled the country, senator, secretary of state under Obama. The lady will have pulled strings during her brilliant career and dodged or received a lot of twisted blows. They came from the White House, his opponent Donald Trump or foreign leaders in the crab basket of international relations.
As for the novelist Louise Penny, the global success of her thrilling thrillers, particularly under the magnifying glass of Quebec inspector Armand Gamache, offers her an impregnable position to dart her eagle eye on the claims of human beings of all persuasions. When it came time to dive into the political thriller, the Canadian writer, based in Sutton, could not find a partner more in tune with global frolicking than Hillary Clinton. Their fiction fed on reliable sources leaps between Washington, Tehran, London, Islamabad, Moscow and the Taliban hideouts, while the bloody undersides of international politics go into fear.
As March 8 approached, hearing on TV these two great mature ladies declaring that women are automatically underestimated and evaluated according to different criteria because of their sex was hardly surprising, while making people shudder.
In state of terror, we see the main heroine, Ellen Adams, US Secretary of State, being stared down by her male colleagues, her high intelligence unrecognized. Often judged on her clothes, her look, her figure, her hair, Hillary Clinton will have tasted bitter medicine. “Power, don’t know,” wrote Lise Payette together, recounting her career as a minister between 1976 and 1980 under René Lévesque. She had felt like a stranger in that jar. Decades later, many women now sit on the councils of ministers, in Quebec as elsewhere. Without stopping the double standard mechanism. Clinton and Penny therefore set about giving their heroines active roles and neurons to play them better. Women still need role models, whether or not they come from pioneering generations.
In their novel, the place of honor granted to female characters is deliberate, by way of example. The Secretary of State, her daughter, her adviser and a Foreign Service employee team up to foil a terrorist plot against Europe and the United States. Leaving from remote corners of the world to meet spies and leaders with ostentatious or hidden fangs, the intrepid amazons go up to the front, more enlightened than the president in office at the White House.
No, the two novelists did not write the warning “Any resemblance to persons existing or having existed is purely coincidental…”. And for good reason… Highly recognizable under the fictionalized actions, Donald Trump is called Eric Dunn, more stupid and dangerous than nature, and Vladimir Putin, Maxim Ivanov, double of the terrible Russian president in belligerent delirium today. Bombs explode. The nuclear weapon becomes a crucial stake, handled by radicalized hands. Like these days.
The internal terrorism of the American extreme right and that of al-Qaeda are sent back to back. The United States is emerging from a disastrous government that has weakened it on the international stage. The fake news flood the Internet by radicalizing hotheads. A former White House correspondent is hiding in Quebec. Welcome to familiar territory.
All that is missing, in short, is the pandemic on the menu of the chaotic past years depicted. In this suspense tightly tied to keep us in suspense, if certain adventures seem eccentric – after all, we are talking about a thriller flamed to the imagination of Louise Penny – the shadow of the political traps faced from the inside hovers everywhere.
How to give birth for sure bestseller ? By joining forces of dynamite. state of terror is translated everywhere and will become a film with obvious popularity. The two fine flies no longer had much to prove, but many messages to send to the inhabitants of this imploding planet. Girls too.