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.

ROBERT LITTELL DISSECTS STALIN'S EPIGRAM

I wonder how hard it has been for this excellent novel to find its audience. Robert Littell is one of America's best espionage novelists, best known for The Company, but a major player ever since his first stunning novel of Cold War spies, The Defection of AL Lewinter. He's never been a one-trick pony (see The Visiting Professor) and his speciality has been Russia, which he once covered as a journalist for Newsweek. But the casual reader might well look at The Stalin Epigram and mistake it for a proto-Ludlum thriller, when in reality it is a finely-judged and moving novel about the poet Osip Mandelstam, and the eponymous poem that got him sent to the Gulag.

It's a novel of ambiguity, which is appropriate because Stalinist Russia was a land where ambiguity was a way of life, where even the simplest tasks of daily living could take on an Alice in Wonderland sense of unreality. It is this atmosphere which Littell not only captures, but thrives on, and he does it by setting up opposites, the most telling being that of Mandelstam himself and his fellow prisoner Fikrit Shotman, champion weightlifter turned circus strongman, imprisoned because a trunk he bought has a sticker of the Eiffel Tower on it. Really. The most telling contrast is thus between Mandelstam, who lives in the mind (even when engaged in a menage a trois with his wife, Nadezhda and the actress who eventually turns him in for writing the offending poem) and Shotman, who lives in the body. Shotman believes what his interrogators tell him, that he is a member of spy ring, even if he didn't realise it, and it is this ability to live with ambiguity, rather than be confounded by it, frustrated with it, that keeps him alive. Whereas Mandlestam winds up being arrested for the second time for writing a poem which would not offend Stalin, in effect being condemned by own artistic insincerity.

Littell writes the book in first person narrations, as if he'd interviewed each character; he does appear to have interviewed Nadezhda, though that too could be an artistic conceit. The narrators range from Stalin's bodyguard to the poet Anna Akhmatova and the writer Boris Pasternak, and there are also telling sections of Mandelstam's 'encounters' with Stalin himself, which also appear to have been conducted solely in the poet's head. The best sections are those where the personal details carry the wider points; occasionally some characters slip into what might almost be authorial voice, but this multi-narrator approach is difficult in the extreme, and overall it's convincing. What makes it work is the building sense of frustration, the foreboding, and the absolute strain of living in that society. Littell does this so well the readers comes to internalise some of the frustrations of the system, to the point where the denoument ought not to be as moving as it is.

You can see where the material for Cold War thrillers, the nature of that Soviet 'evil empire' (sic) came from. I was in Moscow in 79-80, and saw it first-hand, and have seen the difference in the new, more chaotic but less ambiguous Russia. This was the stuff that Littell, LeCarre, Hennisart and McCarry were able to mold into their exceptional spy fictions, but the strength of this book is that we may be led to wonder whether we celebrate the great Russian writers of the Stalinist era with the right understanding of the surreal dangers of their existence.

You might also consider a little aside which Stalin makes to Mandelstam (and which, since it sounds so much like the poet's voice, helps us understand the unreality of their conversations) that his status as a Georgian is like Napoleon's as a Corsican or Hitler's as an Austrian (he might have added Alexander, the Macedonian). The nature of totalitarianism seems to be something easier understood from the outside, or by poets, and in this novel Littell makes this touchingly clear. This is a major novel, which deserves far more attention than it has thus far received.

The Stalin Epigram by Robert Littell
Duckworth, £16.99, ISBN9780715639030

DON WINSLOW'S ISLE OF JOY

I was impressed by the first Don Winslow novel I read, the excellent California Fire & Life, which I reviewed way back in 1999 for Crime Time 2.6 (number 18 if you're counting in decimals). The Power Of The Dog was one of the best books of 2005, a major novel that deserved mainstream attention. Since then he's published two well-crafted suspense novels, The Winter Of Frankie Machine (which Michael Mann is filming, starring Robert De Niro, for release next year) and The Dawn Patrol (which I reviewed last October for Crime Time, you can find that here), strong on characterization and setting, which I've compared elsewhere to T. Jefferson Parker's consistently successful Orange County stand-alones. But if Winslow has been strong on Californian background, it is nothing compared to this brilliant love-note to 1950s Manhattan.

I hadn't known what to expect when I uncovered a copy of the original Arrow edition, published two years before CF&L. Isle Of Joy, it turns out, is a small-scale tour de force. It should have made some reputation for Winslow, although I can see why it may have been overlooked at the time. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek spy thriller, it's not quite comic enough to be farce, but given the way the story proceeds to a most serious finish, one wonders if, had the overall tone been more serious throughout, it might have reached a bigger audience. I think the same fate has befallen a couple of Robert Littell's books, and it's a fine line to walk.

This one is a roman a clef, with a thinly-disguised John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, who in this case is conflated with an earlier JFK lover into a spy. Walter Withers is an ex-CIA agent now working as a PI in late 1950s New York, when he is assigned to bodyguard Senator Joe Keneally's and his wife on Christmas Eve. But his real function is to act as beard when Kenneally needs to sneak off with actress Marta Marlund, and of course Marlund winds up dead, in Keneally's room. What follows is a story which twists and turns between the police, FBI, and CIA, with political capital up from grabs and betrayal suggested at every turn. There are more characters whose models are easily recognisable, not least a fiery Jack Kerouac. Everyone has secrets to hide, even Withers' erstwhile girlfriend, nightclub singer Anne Blanchard, whose life in the Village contrasts sharply with Walter's staid WASPy uptown.

That's important, because as I said the real beauty of this novel is its nostalgic portrayal of New York City in the late 1950s, when it was the center of the known universe, and when anything was possible. Winslow does as fine a job as anyone I've read at conveying the real feel of the era: if you've been watching Mad Men on television, you need to go back a few years before the really modern stuff started to take hold, before the fabric of life itself started to change. It's wonderfully evocative, while at the same time hinting that the betrayals and twists of the worlds of politics and spying were somehow part and parcel of the new world which was coming.

There's also a key scene set at the 1958 NFL championship game, between the New York Giants and Baltimore Colts, the so-called 'Greatest Game Ever Played', when pro football began to slip into the nation's consciousness to replace baseball. Although Winslow makes a couple of sporting errors (Jim Parker, not Joe; and New York wouldn't be talking about Mantle and Maris together in 1958, as Maris was in Kansas City) they're not serious (of course, not everyone is a sports pedant, luckily for them. I'd noticed a couple of baseball anachronisms, and a train-route problem, in the proofs of The Given Day, but according to Dennis Lehane they were caught before the book went to press) I hope they were corrected when Arrow reissued the book last year. The audience that lapped up Mad Men, which was enough for The Mendes Family to hack up Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road on their behalf, ought to lap this up too. It's Yates' era, but it's dealing with the Manhattan the characters in RR left behind. In fact, Winslow nails Yates' dilemma when Walter mulls over the impending death of the Manhattan bar.

'This new American dream, neither city nor country but a banal melange of the two. A society connected by television and automobile and little else except the desperate delusion...that we all want the same thing, a house in the suburbs...A few more years and the clubs will be dead...and I'll be one of the few mourners at the wake. The rest of America will be in their suburban bomb shelters sitting in the televised glow of the seemingly endless parade of cowboy shows.'

That's a brief contemplative pause in what's otherwise a fast and entertaining trip. Winslow deserves a wider audience, and this is the kind of book that, once he has that audience, would cement his reputation.

Isle Of Joy Don Winslow Arrow (1996) £6.99 ISBN 0099706415 reissued 2008 ISBN 9780099706410

ROBERT LITTELL & RICHARD NORTH PATTERSON: VICIOUS CIRCLE AND EXILE

 This was my American Eye column (or in this case, Middle Eastern Eye) for Shots magazine number 10.

The link that once led to it leads now to nothing but an error message, so I've reprinted it here: 

THE WAR WITH NO PEACE 

It's unlikely there's a more intractable geo-political problem, at least on this planet, than that of Israel and Palestine. Not only is it a tragedy of epic proportions within its own lands, but it is a root motivator of much of the extremism that sees itself transformed into terror around the world. It is a conflict which forces the United States government into positions that may flow contrary to its overall best interests, and sometimes contradict much of its stated foreign policy goals. It is also such a tinder box issue in America that it takes a certain amount of courage simply to approach it in a balanced way.

It is surprising how few writers who operate in the espionage genre have delved into the issue itself, which is why two recent novels by very different sorts of novelists are so fascinating to compare. Actually, that one of those two should be Robert Littell is no surprise at all. Littell is one of America's very best spy novelists: one of the first to be compared to both John LeCarre (when he wrote The Defection Of AJ Lewinter) and to Norman Mailer (with his massive CIA novel The Company). If there is a big three of American espionage, Littell would have to be there along with Charles McCarry and Alan Furst (and Furst, thus far, has dealt exclusively in the past). Vicious Circle is a novel firmly grounded in the world of intelligence, with its focus on the hunt for an American-born fundamentalist rabbi and leader of the settlement movement, who is kidnapped and held for ransom by a legendary Palestinian assassin.

Richard North Patterson, on the other hand, is best-known as a writer of legal thrillers, though

following the course of his career, his best work has usually been done on the political side; I once said he's much closer to writers like Allan Drury (Advice and Consent) than to, say, John Grisham or Scott Turow, with whom he's more usually compared. So with that interest in politics, it's not shocking that he chooses the Arab-Israeli conflict as the basis for a thriller, but what is fascinating is the way he frames his book within the boundaries of the courtroom genre in which he's worked. A moderate Israeli prime minister is assassinated in San Francisco, and a Palestinian woman is accused of having masterminded the killing. For her defense, she turns to a prominent local attorney, with whom she had a secret affair in law school, and who is, of course, Jewish.

On the face of it, very different books. Indeed, Patterson's follows his template, which is that of a lawyer, sometimes a lawyer turned politician, engaged in a battle where his loyalties to individuals will be set against both his self-interest and usually his overall aim. It breaks the mold in that the lawyer in question, David Wolfe, is not one of the small circle of characters who recur in Patterson's other novels, and which is one of the things that keeps them interesting, even when the people themselves seem too good to be true. The story becomes, for a long while, Wolfe's own initiation into the intricacies of the conflict, forcing him not so much to choose sides as to reconsider the whole element of sides themselves. Which is, in the end, what Patterson has set out to do. The title of the book reflects the fact that both the Jewish people and the Palestinians are exiles, and winds up taking a very balanced perspective on the roots of the conflict, or, more importantly, the prospects of solution for it. Patterson's is a very liberal approach, recognising common ground, common struggles and common humanity, and what he is at greatest pains to reveal is the way that the conflict has become self-perpetuating, with vested interests of both sides with no desire to see it stop at anything short of total victory.

But the novel itself remains a typically Patterson courtroom battle, with the resolution very much one of personal betrayal, which is the core of all his novels that do resolve themselves in courtooms, rather than the political process. As is frequently the case, the ultimate villain is pretty obvious early on, but the reader is given plenty of uncertainties along the way. That he chose not to pursue this issue with a series character like President Kerry Kilcannon (as I said, most of Patterson's books have featured a cast of recurring, and often interlocking, characters) is significant in itself, and a signal of how intractable he finds the situation. Thus when Wolfe goes to Israel, his education becomes the readers, and there really isn't too much point to the trip other than that.

Littell's book is much more grounded in the world of intelligence, and where Wolfe's attempts to get to the root of the intelligence are an issue for him and his client, in Littell's book the workings of intelligence agencies (and the Palestinians own equivalent) are the core of the story. Its ultimate point, however, is very close to Patterson's, in that his extremist rabbi and Palestinian kidnapper are inevitably drawn together, closer and closer, to the point where their enmity becomes self-contradictory. At the heart of both books is a real sense, an outsiders' sense, that these two peoples are indeed more similar than different, and that a solution is possible. If Littell's ultimate twist turns out to be a personal one, and perhaps not totally convincing in terms of execution, if not character, it is the solution to which he has been building all through the story. Perhaps because his books deal with intelligence professionals, rather than lawyers, Littell may have more faith in the ultimate good intentions of such men.

That the crime and espionage genre should be the place such issues are addressed is fascinating in itself. Speaking about a McCain rally, where the candidate himself repudiated calls by Mitt Romney and Rudi Giuliani for 'more Guantanamos' by asking if America really wanted a 'second Spanish Inquisition', Matt Taibbi reflected that it's a strange world where speaking out against the Inquisition can be seen as an act of political courage. This is more evident for Patterson, who, as a lawyer has presented a balanced case. It's more bleak for Littell, who has laid out the details on the ground, and sees the most promising future for the enforcers, not the peace-makers. These are two informed and revealing books, and make a finely matched pair.