Flipping Through Pages #5 - Heads You Win ( A Book Review)

How are people shaped by the world around them?

Jeffrey Archer has been an amazing discovery since I re-entered the world of reading in earnest. His tapestry of character building to intriguing plots has always enticed me to enter his ecosystem again and again. A dozen or more books later, I fell into the habit of exploring more authors beyond luminaries like Archer and Grisham who dictated my literary tastes of early years.

Coming back to Archer after a long time, Heads You Win was an intriguing tale that had an excellent concept suited for Archer’s storytelling capabilities. Most of Archer’s characters are people challenged at birth to become more than what they are, and overcoming adversity they either become champions of politics or businesses. Power Players of the World.

Taking the background of KGB atrocities in post World War II Russia, the story follows Alexander Karpenko as he and his mother smuggle themselves out of the country after the murder of his union aspiring father. From there, Archer takes the interesting route of dividing the story into two parts, enough to make interesting novels on their own. In one, Alex lands up in the United States and understands business enterprise to become a powerful commerce mogul while Sasha falls in love with the uninhabited freedom of speech in the United Kingdom and rises to Foreign Minister before deciding to stand for President in a Russia struggling for change.

Its wonderful how keeping Alex and Sasha as the same person undergoes radically different circumstances shape them. Love of chess and football, an academic prowess that is reduced to rubble with more risky enterprise that takes off – its intriguing to follow elseworlds in such a manner.

Obviously, the biggest problem comes up at the end. Or rather should I say, is highlighted there. Making Sasha and Alex elseworlds is a wonderful concept. But not when it leads to two disjointed novels being clubbed together with alternating chapters that break the flow of the story.

Archer has wonderfully done this before, putting a character in the focus and narrating events around them before shifting to another – but this was a first where it went to supernatural levels where the same people were experiencing two differing lives. The further we go, the more it differs and that is wonderful given it shows how people are shaped by experiences – but it got irritatingly that it wasn’t the same story being told. I wonder if an alternate method like back to front writing could have solved that. We will never know.

Still, it became a singular story at the end. Without telling the tragic twist at the end of the story, I wish to inform that Archer ties the two together in massive confusion. I will get into it in spoilers, but for me – this is probably one of the most hackneyed endings in any Archer novel I have read.

And it makes a lamentably disjointed book end on a sour note.

So I give it 5 out of 10

+Interesting character development

+Wonderful world building

-The two elseworld stories are disjointed enough to be separate novels

-Too many familiar beats for the main character near the start lends to repeatability

-The ending is convoluted

Spoilers

So at the end of the story, we find Sasha coming to Russia to stand for presidency, but his plane is sabotaged and crashed on orders of Vladimir. While Alex is also coming to Russia for mourning his recently departed uncle and is given a hero’s welcome back – the issue is, it’s for his presidency nomination. Even before that it is hinted there are two ‘Alex’s when Archer mentions one plane passing by while the other crashes. This borders on supernatural especially when Vladimir receives notice that his ‘plan’ has failed (since Alex is alive, but Sasha is dead? Huh?). I don’t know what Archer intended here – if this is to draw a singular conclusion to the story he fails miserably. If this is more metaphoric, then we should have seen Alex somehow save the family from the same incident but given he was never a threat to Vladimir, it’s hard to see why the KGB would wish him harm. It’s a confusing ending to a problematic book that promised much but never understood what it needed to deliver. 

Yes, I know an interpretation that resolves this should be given. And this is mine – the entire story is Sasha’s while Alex’s is the life he sees could have happened flashing before his death. It makes the story even more tragic (which isn’t an Archer staple) but that’s the only way I found made any sense. In that, it made little in the first place. Sigh.