Libertarian book lovers looking for that perfect companion to enjoy while digging your toes in the sand and licking the salt off the rim of your afternoon margarita, need look no further than Vin Suprynowicz's important new novel, The Black Arrow.
The Black Arrow is more than just a rip-roaring adventure story. The author, a widely syndicated libertarian columnist, shines a bright light on the loss of freedom in America and how arrogant and destructive our "we the people" government has become and may well become in his story set in the year 2030.
By now many in the freedom community know that Laissez Faire Books has refused to sell The Black Arrow, because it allegedly contains "gratuitous" sex.
Obviously, any book service has the right to sell or not to sell any book, though I'll admit to being bothered by the decision, and the charge.
Of course, the word means “unnecessary – inserted without reason." For example, if, in an effort solely to increase sales, a Hollywood producer goes back and cuts in some scenes of his heroine taking off her clothes after a movie is completed – scenes without any credible relationship to plot or character – that would be “gratuitous.”
Conversely, the intimacy in The Black Arrow, the love, romance, and, yes, sex, is thoroughly integral and integrated. The more graphic and unpleasant scenes are restricted to the actions of the despicable, manipulative government agents and officials, and serve the express purpose of inducing considerable feelings of rage against them – especially their leader, the corrupt Mayor, Daniel Brackley.
In fact, one of the reason The Black Arrow is so good (and useful) is because the libertarian political themes (that characterize the whole work) soon drop into the background where they most effectively insinuate their way into the reader’s consciousness (a rather clever political strategy) as one gets caught up in a fast-paced story of freedom, rebellion, and – romance.
Yes, romance. At its heart, The Black Arrow is a love triangle, with Cassie, the feisty newspaper columnist and Madison, the young Irish freedom fighter vying for the attentions of the charismatic hero. The man who "would help [the resistance] find a way to channel their anger as well as their talents – or, all else failing, fund a new start for all of them in another, freer land: Andrew Fletcher." Not surprisingly, Fletcher turns out to be the freedom fighter of the title.
However, beyond the romance, Suprynowicz effectively weaves a tale about patriots who love their country but have grown to fear their government and have become weary of its abuses and, thus, like earlier Americans, have chosen to take matters into their own hands. To that end, The Black Arrow's heroes and heroines give up all exercises in futility such as writing their congressmen, penning letters to the editor, writing for well-known blogs, gathering petitions, and trying to elect better leaders. The book is about an over-due, modern day revolution.
The Black Arrow chronicles numerous government misdeeds that are the genesis of the revolution, and read like exaggerations. But, anyone familiar with recent American history will recognize the scenarios as being only slightly embellished actual events, the likes of which continue to take place in this country with alarming frequency and apparent impunity, not unlike what the property owners in New London, Connecticut experienced last week.
It is the realization that the fictionalized accounts are only thinly veiled descriptions of actual government crimes that makes the reader's blood run cold and crystallizes the understanding that voting our conscience will not restore our liberties, but just the opposite.
Succinctly stated, the book is a highly readable "call to arms" written in a Harlequin meets Ayn Rand style. One I'd like to give to the next TSA Neanderthal that orders me to take off my jacket and shoes. Of course, he'd probably have to find someone to read it to him.
A book like The Black Arrow is important because for every possible convert that found the road to freedom though Human Action or The Road to Serfdom – important and necessary as those books are – there could be a hundred more likely to pick up a “page turner” of an adventure novel full of action, intrigue, hair’s-breadth escapes, secret underground caverns, despicable tyrants, and heroic heart-throbs – not unlike the way many of us were first exposed to Libertarian thought in Atlas Shrugged – but without the relentless 50 page monologues, and the necessity of adjust to a 1930s sensibility in which the great industry of modern America is The Railroad.
The more people we can expose to ideals of freedom and inalienable rights, the greater are our chances of actually living in a world where property rights reign supreme and the government is again made cognizant of its limited role in our lives.
But this will only occur if the ideas of freedom and libertarianism manage to percolate their way back into popular culture. Vin Suprynowicz’s riveting new novel, The Black Arrow might accomplish just that.
So why is a libertarian book service turning its back? I'm reminded that some conservative bluenoses denounced the "gratuitous" sex scenes in Atlas Shrugged too.
June 28, 2005
