Guest review by Adam H. Douglas
David Ignatius’ new novel, Phantom Orbit (2024), is like a Zen koan asking: When is a thriller not a thriller?
Let me explain.
Those of you familiar with Mr. Ignatius know he is a renowned reporter for the Washington Post who writes a twice-weekly column there. He is also the author of several works of fiction, mostly thrillers. Personally, I wasn’t familiar with his creative writing until I picked up this new novel.
As you might expect, his writing skills are very good. The man can craft the textures of a wide variety of global cultures and wield national idioms with a time-honed and deft ability. His professionalism shines through on every page.
That’s the good part.
On the flipside, this was a frustrating, meandering read that I would’ve given up on about a quarter of the way through if not for a sense of masochistic curiosity that made me wonder how long it would remain so pointless.
Three Decades of Backstory
The story of Phantom Orbit follows three characters over three decades, from the mid-90s to the current time.
Our first hero is Ivan Vladimirovich Volkov, a one-time student of astronomy and astrophysics at Tsinghua University (Beijing), who is feeling the effects of the dissolution of Soviet Russia. As a young man studying hard, he hooks up with a visiting American woman named Edith Ryan—our second heroine. The two have an intense romantic relationship that ends in a tearful separation.
Ivan greatly regrets the breakup yet wonders if he might’ve dodged a bullet. After all, there were subtle indications that the young woman might’ve been a CIA operative.
Our third character is Professor Cao Lin, a distinguished researcher and member of the Academy of Sciences who eventually becomes head of a committee on “special projects” that reports to the Central Military Commission. Essentially, he’s there to get China’s spy/intelligence space program working, including attacking the Americans by whatever means they can manage.
Promises to Keep
Phantom Orbit commits what I consider to be one of the most grievous sins for thriller novels (or indeed any novel genre if you get right down to it): Failing to follow through on its promises.
The book is marketed as a taut page-turning thriller that is part The Martian, part The Da Vinci Code. The dust jacket teases us with the story of a Russian student (Ivan) stumbling upon an “unsolved puzzle” contained in the writings of the famous 17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler. Ivan brings this puzzle to a prominent scientist within China’s space program, expressing his determination to find the solution that could have “significant implications for space warfare.”
Sounds intense and dynamic, right? Moreover, the book’s prologue is practically textbook-format for attracting thriller aficionados. Here’s a summary:
The year is 2022. Ivan has been utterly devastated by the murder of his only son by a criminal Russian power broker.
Disgusted with his country’s corruption, he decides to take the life-threatening risk of contacting the CIA, looking to alert them about a secret weak point in American satellite systems that could upend their entire communications network.
Failure to Launch
Like any good thriller, the prologue has set the stage for a secret, major crisis for American national security. The stakes are high; the situation is dire. From here, it takes literally two hundred and forty pages of largely irrelevant events for Mr. Ignatius to bring us back to this point.
When an author presents a crisis right at the start of a thriller, you assume that the moments they write after that will play some part in the obvious goal: to overcome and defeat the crisis.
But after the first act of Phantom Orbit (Ivan returns to Russia to spend some last moments with his ailing mother), I began to ask myself how any of the events so far could relate to the satellite bug America must find out about. The answer was that they didn’t.
From there I lost count of the number of pointless interactions that followed. Ignatius subjects us to descriptions of meeting after meeting with various officials of little to no significance beyond, perhaps, some character development. And even those details are mostly things we already knew about from reading the first five pages.
There are even chapters where the plot has a chance to move forward, but then the hero decides not to act at all. Why was this in the book? It’s almost as if the author is delighting in not providing us with any progress.
Houston, We Have a Problem
Some of Phantom Orbit deals with the development of satellite technology within the government cultures of China and Russia, along with how political machinations affect them. I found this to be mildly interesting from a historical perspective. However, the bulk of the novel explores the career trajectories of three professionals and the different kinds of corruption they encounter.
Cao Lin has to maneuver through the intricate face-saving labyrinth of Chinese Communist Party politics, Ivan deals with the dirty disintegration of Russian law, and Edith Ryan must confront a high-ranking official in the CIA who uses his authority to coerce her into a sexual relationship then scuttles her career when it doesn’t please him.
Did any of these character trials have anything to do with resolving the crisis? Almost none of it. Mr. Ignatius might as well have described bathroom breaks—they would be as important as everything he’s telling us.
When we finally get to the crisis point (so many pages later), the resolution is about as exciting as having your driver’s license renewed.
The Non-Discovery
I should’ve realized I was in trouble in chapter one. Here, it reveals what the secret “unsolved puzzle” of the 17th-century astronomer Kepler alluded to on the dust jacket means.
It turns out Ivan did not stumble across some hidden manuscript in a dusty vault. Instead, Kepler wrote and published a widely-known formula for calculating the orbits of planets, but one that cannot be calculated directly, only indirectly. Saying our hero “discovered” this puzzle would be like someone claiming they discovered there was a man named Armstong who walked on the moon. Indiana Jones that ain’t.
Furthermore, Ivan’s great connection to the Kepler equation is that he figures “an elegant way to reduce the number of calculations needed for finding the position [of an orbital object] by iteration.” In other words, Ivan worked out a way to do the math faster.
His mathematical refinement, while useful as it was to fledgling satellite programs in China and Russia, is seriously underwhelming in terms of plot development.
In the end, Phantom Orbit might interest a government historian or someone who works in human resources for a living. The book is, at best, historical fiction—and even then, it’s a bore.
Guest Bio: Adam H. Douglas is a full-time writer and ghostwriter with over two decades of experience in nonfiction, science fiction, speculative fiction, and horror fantasy fiction. Adam’s award-winning short stories have appeared in various publications, including the Eerie River Publishing anthology “It Calls From the Doors,” I/O Magazine, Forbes, Business Insider, and many more.