So some 27 or 28 years after Block finished his Evan Tanner espionage-spoof series in 1970 with Me Tanner, You Jane, Block delves into the series again with a 320-page final book to the series. But, as he explains in an afterword, does he have a senior citizen Tanner collecting social security and going about the world or does he do something else to account for all the lost years. And, here’s where Block goes all science-fictiony on us and comes up with time travel – sort of, in the Rip Van Winkle way. Tanner, for unknown reasons, was literally put on ice – thus, the title – in 1970 and left frozen in a package like a package of frozen fish filets for nearly three decades only to be discovered in the sub-basement accessible only by a hidden trap door under the floor for no good reason. Block has a bit of fun with this concept as Tanner awakens only to wonder whether Nixon or McGovern won the election and to be mystified when told Nixon resigned and Agnew to and the president is now some guy named Clinton. There’s just a lot of history he has missed, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. He is also introduced to a Mac and the internet and spends six months getting up to speed on the world. Although he does remind the reader it has been nearly three decades since he has had sex, but now there’s a whole new world of AIDs and blood tests and the like.
The Chief locates him and asks where he has been and Tanner tells the Chief he has been frozen, which the Chief thinks means he was held incommunicado in a Swedish cell. Burma is now Myanamar, a brutal dictatorship who put national leader Aung San’s daughter under house arrest. The Agency does not like how things are going in Myanamar with the Chinese making in-roads and Tanner’s mission is to go there and shake things up and destabilize things by making contact with extreme prejudice with the daughter under house arrest.
What follows is a comedy of errors as Tanner makes his way across Southeast Asia with every entrepreneur he meets thinking he is there on some child sex tour deal, being followed by the necessary liasons, and fleeing from the secret and not-so-secret police as his life comes under extreme danger.
For my money, the best parts of the story are all to do with the time travel or sleep for three decades stuff. There was no end to the odd scenes that could be made of that stuff. The espionage exploits in Myanamar harken back to the earlier Tanner novels, but seem a little redundant here.
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