A reminder, since it’s been a while since I’ve dipped into this: “Kindlefluff” is the term I use for my reviews of books which I absolutely would not have acquired were they not going for cheap or free on Kindle (not counting Kindle Unlimited pieces). Hang onto your hats folks, because this one is a doozy.
The Last Degree by Dina Rae was a book I picked up for free but, at the time I got it at least, had a list price of £1.92. At the time, I both had a fairly clear idea of what I was getting into and absolutely no idea of what direction the book would take. You see, it’s a conspiracy thriller about the Freemasons, and you never know which way one of those things is going to jump. By the end of the book, I was left in no doubt as to where Dina Rae’s priorities lay as an author, and ended up glad that I hadn’t given her any money..
The thing about Masonic conspiracy theories is that they’re like the Swiss Army knife of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories almost always boil down to politics in the end, and specifically revolve around the alleged conspirators plotting to do something for reasons the theorist finds foul – you almost never have theorists saying “well, actually I kind of agree with the agenda of the big conspiracy, I just object to their methods”.
The glorious thing about the Masons is that they deliberately set up this veil of secrecy around themselves, and whilst you can read up on their rituals and secret doctrines if you like they’re all highly symbolic and you can more or less fit your own ideas to the symbols. This means that you can invent more or less any ideology or agenda for them you want. Are your conspiracy theories concocted from a socialist rich-vs.-poor perspective? Well, the Freemasons are loaded and were founded in the 17th-t0-18th century by a bunch of decidedly bourgeois types. Are you a conservative sort who fears conspiracies of dangerous radicals? Just point to Masonic links to the French Revolution and American Revolution! What if you’re convinced that the world is run by a conspiracy of conservative reactionaries out to preserve the status quo? No problem – the Masons are the biggest, oldest and most formalised old boy’s network you could care to find. What if you’re a Christian worried about the end times? Well, there’s something decidedly occult-y about all those secret rituals, so just assume it’s all a slippery slope into Satanism and run with that.
As such, I ploughed into the novel knowing in advance it would be about a Masonic global takeover as the fruition of their age-old New World Order one world government conspiracy (which theorists have been warning us about since back in the days when the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was still hot off the hoaxers’ press), but with absolutely no idea of the specific form this New World Order would take. Though it is sold as fiction, it’s pretty evident from the blurb and author bio that this is one of those Kindle books which are basically the author’s fictionalised manifesto, a bid to get their ideas out there without having to go to the effort of actually providing sources for most of their assertions, using the cover of fiction as an excuse to a) avoid libel suits and b) just assert stuff as fact knowing that even if it’s proven wrong, you can just say it was part of the fiction.
In this case, Rae presents us with a multi-pronged story, unfolding in several different time periods. You have new mother Jane Claywater’s desperate bid to keep her newborn son out of the hands of sinister Masons in 1965, a Chicago Police Department investigation of the ritual murder of rogue stock exchange trader Rory Schanck in 2000, and the intersection of a group of survivalists, a Tea Party candidate’s Presidential campaign, Harvard internal politics and the survivors of the earlier plot threads in the heady years of 2011 and 2012 – the last years Before Globalisation. You can more or less work out where it’s going in the early chapters if you are up on your conspiracy theories; the heavy emphasis on the ritual aspects of Freemasonry combined with the fact that a lot of the good guys are Bible-believing Christians made it clear early on that there was going to be an evangelical bent to the book.
I actually read to the end of this one, but only because it’s the sort of literary car crash I have difficulty looking away from. Rae’s limitations as an author are painfully evident; to be fair to her, she actually seems to be quite good when it comes to plotting out the overall structure of the story, and I was quite impressed with the way she juggled the three different time periods early on before entwining the different plot threads together suitably before the conclusion.
The problem is that whilst the structure of the book is fairly sensible, the way she actually fills out that structure is barely competent. The events after globalisation are rattled through at such a rapid rate that it’s hard to take them seriously – which is particularly troublesome since the plot points include a band of 33 survivalists successfully raiding the World Army headquarters and the peoples of the world happily accepting a world government model based around a council of 10 kings.
Large chunks of the book consists of the characters sitting around swapping conspiracy theories, which in practice entails Rae dumping her research notes on us and calling it dialogue. Ra has this maddening habit of people who’ve just taken a writing class of always coming up with a different synonym for “said” at every stage of a conversation, and also hasn’t learned that you don’t need to wait until a character has stopped speaking to indicate that they are the one who is speaking – there’s several quite jarring bits where you have to sit through a mini-speech before you found out which character was actually speaking, which doesn’t exactly help get the reader immersed in the story.
On top of all this, the book clearly hasn’t been given a thorough proofread, or even a once-over with a spellcheck. Words are just plain missing, occasionally hilarious typos appear (“riga mortis” for “rigor mortis”, for instance), and if that wasn’t enough Rae also insists on some weird grammatical conventions – referring to Freemasonry as “the Freemasonry” all the time when that isn’t the convention, and likewise calling the Knights Templar “the Knights of Templar”.
She also shows curious bursts of coyness; the Bilderberg Group, another recurring star of New World Order conspiracy theories, is referred to as the Vanderbild Group consistently, and I find it odd that Rae is happy to libel Freemasonry as an institution but suddenly wants to put up a smokescreen when she discusses the Bilderbergs – if anything, the Bilderberg attendees have historically given even less fucks about the conspiracy theories surrounding them than the Freemasons have.
Likewise, and bearing in mind this was written in 2012 during the pre-Trump era, Rae has the President of the US following George W. Bush be President al-Fawwaz, the choice of an Arabic-sounding name I guess being in line with how the “Obama is a gay Kenyan Muslim” crowd always like to call him “Barack HUSSEIN Obama”, and the regular references to corrupt goings-on in Chicago are reminiscent of anti-Obama sorts trying to paint him as a manipulative product of the Chicago political machine, but Rae never once actually tries to diss Obama directly, which seems mildly cowardly to me, though since President al-Fawwaz is meant to be part of an inner circle of murderous Satanists maybe she decided the Secret Service visits wouldn’t be worth it.
Rae’s command of plotting and storytelling, though loose, is at least coherent enough to allow her to express some outright repugnant positions. For instance, although the narration appears to acknowledge that torturing and murdering an elderly couple for information is an extreme act which we can’t have a whole lot of sympathy for, at the same time when conspiracy-nutty Vietnam vet/ex-cop Dan O’Leary does it it feels like Rae wants us to consider it an ugly but necessary nastiness. Dan ends up being the survivalists’ military leader and is primarily responsible for the different survivalist groups joining together towards the end of the book, and in the plot thread set in Chicago in 2000 he’s the one cop who susses out what’s going on with Rory’s murder from the start, and almost all of the narration around him positions him as someone we are meant to consider as one of the good guys. It’s mildly ironic that, despite being deeply sceptical about the whole War On Terror deal, Rae is happy to go along with the “torture is sometimes necessary” myth which was one of its underpinnings.
Dan is not the only cop involved in the investigation of Rory’s murder who goes bad. Ann Wilson is one of the first detectives on the scene and is the only woman in the police department to get any appreciable spotlight time. In the early chapters, she is depicted as being fairly competent at her job and a genuinely sympathetic character who is as keen as any of her colleagues to crack the case.
Then, spontaneously and without warning, we’re suddenly told that actually she’s very, very corrupt and is always looking out for a chance to enrich herself, and she ends up compromising the investigation by murdering one of her colleagues and helping an important witness to just disappear off the grid for the sake of acquiring millions of dollars so that she can disappear and live a life of luxury with her “expensive, beautiful girlfriend”. (What, you have to pay subscriptions on them? Is that what I’ve been doing wrong?)
She seems to do this purely out of greed – I was half-expecting it to turn out that she sabotaged the investigation because she was a secret member of one of the all-women orders of Masonry, since Rae seems to have no qualms about ascribing sexual depravity to Freemasons in other contexts and she already seemed to be drawing a connection between Ann being a lesbian and Ann being greedy, amoral and corrupt. (Remember, Ann is doing this at least in part so that she can keep up those payments on her girlfriend subscription.)
What tops it off, though, is the character of Larry Dedman, who rises from humble origins to become the first Tea Party President of the USA only to discover he’s the Antichrist and utterly sell out all his principles after he’s been in the office for a bit. Larry’s story is stuffed with unintentional irony – such as when he’s able to wrangle himself a job with the city government early on in his career by calling in a favour from a friend, which is precisely the sort of nepotism Masons are regularly accused of but which Rae presents as this wholesome example of well-intentioned folks helping each other out. But what really blew me away was this little speech he gives immediately after his election victory:
Good afternoon. We did it! You, the People, single-handedly took down the most powerful establishment in the world. You sent Washington D.C. a message they will never forget. You elected someone who works for you, and not the other way around. Your ideas were heard, not the special interest groups of this country and even this world. Your tax dollar will be spent on services for you that you approve of – not on other countries you have no interest in. Not on illegal immigrants you don’t want here. Not on wars meant to protect corporations you don’t own. Not on bailouts for banks you don’t run. You are going to Washington through me. Together we will use nationalism, capitalism, idealism, activism, mercantilism, professionalism, imagism, conservativism, entrepreneuralism, exceptionalism, and even imperialism without globalism, environmentalism, liberalism, communism, socialism, and totalitarianism. Then we are going to restore this country back to greatness.
To reiterate: this isn’t the Masonic Antichrist talking. Larry hasn’t had that drastic personality shift yet. This is a speech which at least some of the good guys find encouraging (but are disappointed when Larry doesn’t follow through) and the bad guys are quick to undermine, and represents the moment where it’s clear that the book’s moral framework is completely wacky (not to mention predicting the whole MAGA framework 4 years in advance – right down to the folks who voted for Trumps not getting any of the shit they were hoping to get as the Republican party uses Trump to get back to kleptocracy as usual).
Likewise, check out this speech that Larry – who, again, has not yet become the Antichrist – gives to the UN, to the dismay of the Masonic conspirators:
I’m here to talk about money. To begin with, the United Nations will be dismantled after I am inaugurated. The American taxpayers cannot afford it. They cannot afford carbon credits, either. If other countries refuse to pay for their pollution, then why should we? Again, the American taxpayers will no longer be kicked around. Foreign aid is another expense that will be completely cut. I’m still getting over the billions we just gave to Europe. In fact, we should be requesting our own aid. As you all know, we are on the verge of economic collapse. From now on we will be concentrating on paying off all of our foreign loans. Our financial irresponsibility has made us vulnerable. We are sick of cowering to the policies of others. Since I am speaking about financial matters, I plan on withdrawing our troops in Iran, Libya, and Afghanistan. Again, we can no longer afford to pay for… I’m not sure what. And neither is the average American.
This is, once again, deliriously off-message as far as the Masons are concerned.
The question of Larry brings up another point: namely, that for a conspiracy that has supposedly been running for hundreds if not thousands of years, the Masons don’t seem to be very good at it. Even though they set up one of their own as Larry’s campaign manager, you’d think he’d have make an effort to get Larry onside with the Masonic agenda before the election, at least so he could tell his masters to fix the election for another candidate if it looked like Larry wouldn’t be malleable.
Likewise, Adrian Rodriguez – the police captain in overall charge of the Rory murder investigation in 2000 – is appointed at Dean of Harvard in 2011 since he went back into academia after his police career, and soon becomes a thorn in the side of the university’s Freethinkers club, a key Masonic recruiting ground. Why would the Masons ever allow someone they weren’t sure of to become Dean of one of their centres of power?
The Masons in The Last Degree are a lot like the conspiracy in The Passage – they are ruthlessly competent when the plot needs them to be and powerless when the plot needs them to be, and the end result is that they don’t feel like a real organisation with sensibly worked-out capabilities and competencies so much as a cartoon villain at the mercy of the author’s whims. This is not good in this case because part of the point of the book seems to disseminate Masonic conspiracy theories, but at every turn the novel hurts the credibility of those theories by presenting an utterly boneheaded vision of how the conspiracy is supposed to operate.
Jumbled Thoughts of a Fake Geek Boy 