SOURCE: "Gulp!" in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIII, No. 20, December 18, 1986, pp. 58-60.

Edwards is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, he faults Whirlwind for its lack of appeal and believability, lamenting that the novel "has nothing to do with any life I've ever heard of."

Whirlwind, a "now" book for which the publisher reportedly paid Clavell $5 million, the highest price ever paid for a novel, takes place in Iran between February 9 and March 4, 1979, just after the flight of the Shah and the advent of Khomeini but well before the hostage crisis. Almost 1150 densely printed pages are devoted to these twenty-four days; the evident aim is to let us know just what all of an enormous international cast of characters were doing moment by moment. But they often weren't doing much of anything, and the consequence is not fiction but chronicle run mad...