A review by travvyt
Shibumi by Trevanian

2.0

I was never 100% sure what to make of this book. At times it seemed to be a straight-forward spy/assassin story....at other times, it seemed to be a parody of the same genre. The main character, Nicholai Hel is part ninja, part extreme athlete, part super-spy and part super-human. He's the world's greatest assassin and the world's greatest lover all in one. Again though, sometimes it seemed the author was creating this amazing character and other times almost as if Hel was too over the top and meant to poke fun at the James Bond-type characters in other books. The story itself was interesting enough but the Mother Company came off like a Bond villain (or with some of the supporting players even an Austin Powers villain) and the author would take long breaks from the story to talk about Hel. Over 100 pages were devoted to his backstory (which is ok, I guess but it seemed like more detail went into the backstory than the present day story). All the amazing exploits were just hinted at and never really described, but his childhood and early years were deeply described. Once the story started progressing again, the author took another long (50+ page) break to talk about caving...which really had no bearing on the story whatsoever.

Overall, it was a good story that was spoiled by inconsistent storytelling. I don't know that I have much interest in reading more Trevanian books based on this one.