Set against this bloodless detachment from the suffering of scores of thousands of people, is the rather risible psychology of the main characters. There’s a storyline concerning the character Jim Dawson, initially satirised as a big-talking American novelist whose image is created by PR firms but who is actually a coward. During the course of the novel he learns – through being tortured by the dictator’s goons and then surviving the hurricane – ‘true humility’ and to appreciate ‘what really matters in life’. This is such a thin and obvious character, and the lessons he learns so shallow and trite, and the escapades he goes through so risibly improbable, that he epitomises the paper-thin characterisation and thumpingly banal ‘lessons about life’ that these books contain.