This fascination with spy novels may pass soon, or it may not. I’m not making any apologies or taking any bets. Not really. I seem to be more powerfully attracted to good spy fiction as time goes by, as I age. (Or decay, depending on your level of compassion or charity). It’s like one of those exercises you would find in a magazine, edited by someone who took one undergraduate course of psychology, where you are asked to share with someone you know something about yourself that they do not know. I would have to come up with something like: had I been a student in Germany in the early Seventies, I would have been a member of Baader-Meinhoff.
I choose not to elaborate on this.
This novel’s perspective is that of the cousins on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean. An American take on the Cold War, as it were or: Across the Pond, with a View. It starts in pre-war Germany and ends in Cold War Europe. We meet the protagonist, Paul Christopher, in the Germany of 1939. He is the teenage son of a slightly eccentric American father and an aristocratic German mother. The family is the subject of close scrutiny by the Nazi Security apparatus, who are deeply suspicious of them. With good reason as it turns out, as they are helping people escape the country. The plot is leavened by love and lust, as life usually is. Reinhard Heidrich lusts after his mother, and he is in love with an girl who is politically undesirable because her grandfather had been born Jewish. The instrument of their persecution is a suitably sinister Gestapo officer called Major Franz Stutzer. Things go badly wrong. People die, disappear, are tortured and abused, and the Second World War starts and ends. The rest of the narrative takes place in 1959. Christopher is a seasoned CIA agent, tough, resourceful and out for revenge. When he learns that Stutzer is still alive, he hunts him down and meets out his reward.A satisfying plot with enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages. What makes it memorable though is the depth of the characters and vivid descriptions of locale. The atmosphere is well crafted and the juxtaposition of the old and the new world deftly handled. A worn out Europe suffers as the playing field of forces it has little control over. In it the Americans stride, confident and capable, but not entirely sure how to take on an enemy that scares them on a deeply ideological level. The East Bloc of the 50’s is dour and dank, but with the lingering memory of more splendid times, as if the memory of the good times has not entirely faded, has not been entirely subsumed by the dreariness of the dreams of grey men with limited understanding of Marx and Lenin, as if they had read the back cover of the book without having opened the text, and decided to build a society on that knowledge. More than the mere plot, the novel delves into the importance of history, both personal and political. How we come to be where we are, and how we rationalise our acts in terms of the past are important themes, intelligently handled. We are shaped by our pasts, but we may choose to use that in different ways. In short, we are not the slaves of our pasts, and though we may act according to its dictates, we may choose not to. Charles McCarry is a retired CIA officer who, we are told, operated under deep cover in Europe during the Cold War. His knowledge of that stand-off, of that place and people and way of thinking, certainly bears that out. He has written nine novels and has been translate into twenty languages. In the spy novel genre he is one of the more worthwhile authors.
Read one of his books - you won’t be sorry.
