By David Morrell
I remember Olman telling me I might like Testament, primarily because of its brutality. I admit that a survival thriller with wallops of sadistic violence did intrigue me, not to mention David Morrell was also the guy who wrote Rambo, a movie I liked and whose literary source I’d like to read one day.
The opening chapter wasted no time in dispensing said brutality, in the form of infanticide. Reuben Bourne finds his Siamese cat slumped over her bowl of milk. As he’s figuring out what to do with the cat’s body, his wife Claire has given the milk bottle to their baby son, Ethan. He realizes too late that the milk has been poisoned and he just barely stops his daughter Sarah from drinking it. But it was far too late for little Ethan, who stiffens up and dies!
Now what heinous person would try to kill an innocent family this way? Reuben Bourne was an investigative journalist who got invited by the leader of a paramilitary white supremacist group to write about them in a positive light. Even though Bourne did not believe in their ideology, he nevertheless got vetted by their leader, Kess, who trusted Reuben enough to show him the ins and outs of his organization, known as The Guardians of the Republic.
Of course, being the principled journalist he was, Reuben ended up publishing a damning piece about them instead. And idiot that he was, Reuben didn’t think to go into hiding after betraying the trust of a powerful white supremacist leader. Like did he not think that a psychopathic fascist by the name of Kess wouldn’t hesitate to send his racist militant henchmen to take him down along with his family?
If I was Reuben’s wife, and saw how my husband’s stupid principles directly led to the death of our infant, I would’ve demanded to go into witness protection. And if that didn’t happen fast enough, I would've taken my surviving daughter, divorced the hell out of him, and fled to another country. I know you shouldn’t give an inch to white supremacists, but after having your 9?yo daughter deflowered by a gun belonging to a neo-Nazi thug posing as a cop at her school, having your home razed by bullets and then burnt down to the ground, I would’ve murdered my idiot husband myself.
But no, Claire and Sarah end up going along with Reuben and hole up in a remote cabin near the mountains. Reuben had the foresight to buy a couple of horses and devise a getaway plan in case they got found out, which they inevitably do. They flee to the mountains on their horses and find an abandoned town in some hidden valley inhabited by an old hermit. Kind of unrealistic, but I guess it’s to inject some Western elements into the story. Soon enough, some redneck thugs manage to track them there, which result some violent confrontations involving the old man helping them fight. There are gun shots and blazing fires. Claire gets shot while riding away on her horse and dies, while Reuben and Sarah are forced to leave her body and hide in the mountain wilderness.
The details about Reuben and Sarah surviving the winter in their snow shelter was too realistic and long. Morrell invested a lot of time learning about wilderness survival which explained why he went into such detail, which unfortunately put the plot on hold. This section was also the most depressing, as Reuben’s daughter gradually wastes away, getting weaker and weaker until she finally fucking died. I got so demoralized I had to stop reading it during my vacation in Vancouver. Normally, I can separate fictional horror from reality (after all, I watched X while visiting beautiful Ucluelet). But Testament was so unrelentingly bleak and grim, it was a real downer!
I would’ve preferred Morrell dispensing with the survival details and killing Sarah off sooner. With the daughter being the last family member to die, this would spur Reuben to take some real action and be “Bourne” again. Morrell could then use his high-powered writing to describe how Reuben goes all Jason Bourne or Liam Neeson by finding the men at each rung of the neo-Nazi industrial complex, torturing them for information, and getting closer to his target - Kess. This has been done to death in movies, but since I don’t read much revenge thriller books, I would’ve been down with this narrative arc!
In terms of character arc, it takes a long time for Reuben Bourne to become the monster that’s necessary get to Kess. Morrell skims over all the juicy details about how Bourne makes his way to Kess, and when he finally has Kess sighted by the scope of his gun, Bourne couldn’t bring himself to kill him! So it’s clearly evident that a straight-up vengeance novel was not the kind of story Morrell wanted to tell (he explains this in the foreword in the context of the Vietnam War: “In my opinion, Testament has violence enough. Those who require the need for more should look inward, for that is the point of the novel.”)
This makes it rather frustrating for me as a reader, because you want Bourne to take Kess down. Bourne stays true to his principles, but at what cost. Even the old man had no qualms about
killing a nameless henchman back at the abandoned town, while Bourne watched in stunned silence, barely holding it together while the old man does most of the dirty work.
He wanted to say something but he didn’t know what and it wasn’t any use. The old man was suddenly gone, running off into the storm, and he was standing there, sweating, staring at the fast-drifting swath of blood in the snow, smelling burned hair and clothing and flesh, racing abruptly in the direction he’d been told, hurrying along the line of burning buildings…
Much of the novel was like this, with Bourne barely one step ahead of his enemies and barely able to keep his family safe for very long. Any ordinary person would’ve given up long ago, so it’s a testament to Bourne, idiot that he was, that he and his remaining family have been able to survive this long. The whole time I was aching for Reuben to transform into Jason Bourne and fuck shit up for those sadistic neo-Nazis. In order to fight monsters, you have to become one. But this never happens. This was ultimately a difficult read because it was so depressingly existential.
At least, Morrell got the neo Nazi thing right. Testament was published in 1975, so even back then, white supremacists and neo-Nazis were infiltrating all levels of society. I do wonder if portraying them as this powerful, omniscient entity was considered a bit much back then, because nowadays neo-Nazism and nationalism is a global phenomenon and out in the open, thanks to the internet.
We’re not alone in this. There are dozens of organizations like us. We alone have twenty thousand trained dependables, another twenty thousand waiting to be trained. Put our members in with those in all the other loyalist groups in this country, and you come up with a figure that’s just slightly under the present strength of the United States Marine Corps which has two hundred and four thousand the last time I checked. And they’re everywhere, in industry and government, in law enforcement and the military. The guy you bought your car from, the quiet fellow who lives up the street, any one of them might easily be one of us.
