TANNER ON ICE

Evan Tanner, the soldier of misfortune who’s been out of commission since Me Tanner, You Jane (1970), returns, youthful and hale as ever, for a murky assignment in Burma. Tanner is chilled to the bone, and no wonder: Ever since a tenderhearted activist whose politics didn’t square with Tanner’s decided to get him out of the picture, he’s spent the past 25 years cryogenically frozen. Defrosted, updated—in a series of welcome-to-the-—90s vignettes that are the best thing in the book—and restored to his daughter-figure Minna, the Lithuanian royal claimant who’s now grown to seem as old as he is, Tanner’s ready for another posting at the hands of his old chief. Tanner’s ostensible assignment this time is to destabilize the repressive regime in Myanmar (“Burma” to the retro sensibilities of Tanner and the Chief) by assassinating Aung San Suu Kyi, the housebound Nobel laureate who’s the world’s most famous dissident, at the behest of billionaire businessman Rufus Crombie, who wants to install a new regime that can buy more American goods. But even before he’s politely forbidden from entering Suu Kyi’s street, Tanner knows he isn’t going to kill her. Unfortunately, it’s never entirely clear what he’s going to do in Burma instead, other than drink cheap local liquor, get involved with a Eurasian refugee whose ancestors have picked the losing side in every political struggle in the past century, and find a dead man in his hotel bed. Inevitably, Tanner gets picked up by the police, and then at last he’s got a mission: to get out of Dodge ahead of the hangman while giving full rein to his creator’s matchless gifts as a raconteur. Block (Everybody Dies, 1998, etc.) writes about Burma with the insider’s slant of somebody who’s spent time there, and with the disenchantment of somebody who doesn’t expect to be invited back. Tanner’s fans, happy to see him back in action, won’t mind if the action doesn’t seem to go anywhere in particular.