CHARLES MC CARRY CHASES CHRISTOPHER'S GHOSTS

Charles McCarry must get bored with being called the American LeCarre, but Paul Christopher was his George Smiley, his name just as symbolic, and his past even more revealing. After producing the five novels that elevated his status among spy novelists, McCarry moved sideways, going beyond LeCarre in one sense, as he traced Christopher's roots back to frontier days in his epic historical novel, The Bride Of The Wilderness. Then he extended the saga, using Christopher's nephew, Henry Hubbard, before bringing the prototype back alongside Hubbard in the aptly-titled Old Boys (2003), a satire on both the aging of series characters and the DaVinci Code, but also an answering of some of the questions about Christopher raised in the last of those five novels. Now, in Christopher's Ghosts, McCarry addresses the central question of what turns men into spies.

Although loyalty is one of the central virtues of the 'old boys' who made up the OSS and early CIA, their values imherited and to some extent mimicking the 'honourable schoolboys' of British intelligence, McCarry, like LeCarre, is at his most interesting when he is examining the paradox of honour, loyalty, and trust among those who betray for a living, hence the brilliant ambiguity of the title of 'The Secret Lovers'. Those sorts of betrayals are at the heart of Christophers Ghosts.
In 1939 Paul is 16, living in Berlin with his writer father and his German mother, when he is set upon by some Hitler youth. He is helped by Rima, a Jewish girl his own age, whose father is a doctor no longer allowed to practice by the Nazis, but convinced this persecution of Jews is some a passing mistake. Because he is a German as well as an American, Paul is in vulnerable position, something recognised by Major Stutzer ('Dandy') of the Gestapo, who has his eye on the Christophers, perhaps because his one of his bosses, Heydrich, has his eye on Paul's mother Lori. As Paul encounters first love, the Christophers soon find themselves entangled in his relationship, and in their own, and when Paul turns down the chance at safety in order to try to save Rima, it ends in tragedy.

Twenty years later, Paul is working for the CIA, tracking Stutzer for his own revenge, when he crosses paths with the Mossad, who are tracking him for their own different sort of revenge. By now, Christopher is firmly ensconced in the old boys' network of the CIA, and readers who recall the man of the first five novels will see the already formidable sense in which he is closed off to almost everything except the value-systems of the job. McCarry invests the chase with enough uncertainty to keep it interesting, and enough paralleling of the earlier story to make it fit like a perfect puzzle. It ends in a fashion that is somewhat predictable, and might almost seem anti-climactic, except for the book's final line, which is one of the most perfect and telling I have ever read: making everything fall together, and echoing through all the other Paul Christopher novels with a sort of sombre toll. If Old Boys were a satire, this novel, beneath its historical trimmings, is a stunning coda to the Christopher series.

Christopher's Ghosts by Charles McCarry
 Duckworth £7.99 ISBN 9780715637654

CHARLES MC CARRY'S SHANGHAI FACTOR

There is often a bittersweet taste to Charles McCarry's best work. In Christopher's Ghosts (see my 2008 review here), it was the pang of nostalgia, and the events that made McCarry's trademark fictional spy what he became. There is a touch of that same sadness in The Shanghai Factor, but here we are watching a man become a spy, and it's not so much that he has to learn about the losses necessary when one plies that trade, it's our growing realisation that the trade itself comes naturally to him.

McCarry's anonymous hero falls under the wing of an experienced CIA man named Burbank, who runs him on a mission in China which will remain secret between the two of them, and grows more and more complicated as he infiltrates, as it were, the complicated world of Chinese business. Eventually, back in America, he and a Chinese agent will play a complicated game of cat and mouse, each trying to 'turn' the other, each knowing what the other may be doing—a battle of wills and wits which McCarry compares metaphorically to their playing one-on-one basketball.

This is complicated by the fact that our hero is in love, with a Chinese woman, Mei, whose bicycle-crash meeting with him in Shanghai identifies her as an agent. Of course the affair ends, as he moves on in the world of China, but the anonymous affair (Mei, of course, must be a code name) remains for him almost obsessional, even after he has left China.

As the novel builds up, the suspense, which is built from the many ambiguities of the tale, intensifies, which has the remarkable effect of putting the reader into the position of the agents. This is where the inevitable comparisons of McCarry to (I would argue early) LeCarre are most valid—both have this ability to confront and confound the reader with the complexities of the world of espionage. And both are well aware, as we are told here, in probably the most crucial line in the book that 'the entire basis of espionage is trust'.

Like LeCarre, McCarry is also aware that the nature of spying has changed, because the nature of the world has changed, and the old battle of two super powers on a roughly equal footing has disappeared. Commercial interests have their own part in the game now, and in China, we have a budding superpower which remains in part the 'inscrutable' land we read about in 1930 pulp magazines and Fu Manchu novels.

The complicated plot is resolved in a somewhat less ambiguous manner than some readers might have hoped—there are a couple of twists whose outlines, at least, should have been more obvious to our hero—and I was convinced that one final twist of betrayal was coming at the end, but it never does.

But I mentioned that McCarry's work has often been bittersweet, and there is one revelation which has the same sort of impact as his stunning last line of Christopher's Ghosts. Again it involves lost love, and it works because it is so understated, and we realise that one of the basic spying assumptions our agent made, right from the beginning, was completely wrong, totally backwards, and that sometimes people do act for reasons of their own, reasons of the heart. As our hero himself states, in a bit of self-created Lao Tzu or Laozi as he's now known, 'the wise man does not believe in triumph'. 

The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry

Head Of Zeus  £14.99 ISBN 9781781855096

NOTE: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

CHARLES MC CARRY: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Charles McCarry, one of the very best spy novelists, is online at the Guardian now; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper sometime soon. It appears pretty much as I wrote it, some time ago, with just brief updating on the books he'd published since then. I particularly recommend The Miernik Dossier, an assured, structurally fascinating debut novel. Tears Of Autumn is a fine novel, which I mentioned whenever I was writing about the fiction of the JFK assassination; I was lucky enough to be able to review some of his later books in various places, The Secret Lovers, with its wonderfully ambiguous title, is one of the very best.

His late return to his Paul Christopher books came with Old Boys, which I reviewed for the Spectator. It's behind a pay wall, but maybe I can resurrect it. It is partly tongue-in-cheek, but great fun.  Christopher's Ghosts was not tongue-in-cheek and had an ending whose final line explained the whole of the Paul Christopher series; a tour de force of a finish (my review is here). I also reviewed The Shanghai Factor, which has another great ending; you can find that review here.