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Between Two Fires: A Single Spy

09 Monday Oct 2017

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Review: A Single Spy, by William Christie
Minotaur/St. Martin’s, 2017. 388 pp. $26

Alexsi Ivanovich Smirnov, the orphan-thief protagonist of this superb, hair-raising thriller, is both feral and sympathetic. I wouldn’t have thought that possible, but, then again, if you read A Single Spy — and if you like this genre at all, I suggest you do — you’ll discover that many things are possible.

The first is that Alexsi, as a mere teenager, is more than a match for the smugglers he’s taken up with in Azerbaijan. This would be a dangerous occupation anytime, but in 1936, there are Russian soldiers on one side and rival gangs on the other, and no one can afford scruples. Still, Alexsi trusts his instincts. As a practiced thief, he has a sixth sense for when others intend to rob or sell him, and whoever tries winds up with his throat cut. However, the NKVD catches him where he shouldn’t be, and just when he thinks he’s about to get a bullet in the skull, they startle him by offering him a job. If he passes their tests — and the penalty for failure is that bullet — he’ll work for them, doing the killing, robbing and prowling he’s always done, except for the state. The rewards can be enormous, as he learns immediately:

The first thing Alexsi noticed was that, unlike every other Soviet apartment, there wasn’t anyone else living there. Which was unprecedented in his experience. There were freshly painted walls and thick blue curtains. A sofa, chairs, a table. Spare and severe furniture, in the Soviet style, but to his eyes unbelievably luxurious. A gas stove and a refrigerator instead of an ice box. He opened it up and was greeted by a gust of cool air and shelves filled with food. Milk, sour cream, butter, cheese. If they were trying to impress him, it was working.

But everything’s a test. No question his handlers ask is ever innocent, no matter how it sounds, so he must think one step ahead, always. His greatest asset is his poker face, which conceals more than they know, in particular a detestation for bullies and a soft spot for a friend’s family, his only childhood respite from a violent, abusive father.

In the abstract, it seems improbable that an NKVD agent, hired and trained to be a ruthless operative for Comrade Stalin, would possess both a human core and a healthy skepticism of the Soviet regime. Yet Alexsi, despite his savage instincts for survival, has a code that tells him not to hurt anyone who hasn’t tried to harm him. Naturally, his instructions and that code will conflict. And the complications multiply, because he can only escape the fearful, terrifying Soviet Union by accepting an assignment to Berlin. There, he eventually joins the Abwehr and becomes a double agent, reporting everything back to Moscow at the risk of his life. Caught between two fires, Alexsi must be slippery indeed to avoid the flames. “No — and furthermore” governs every moment. Not only must he please his two masters while avoiding detection, once more, no conversation is innocent, no matter with whom. He takes to heart his NKVD mentor’s advice never to reveal his true identity to anyone, for any reason — and if they guess, he must find a way to dismiss it convincingly. The tension fairly ripples off the page.

Alexsi’s vantage point allows him to make private observations, comparing the two totalitarian regimes he knows. For instance, the night of Kristallnacht, he’s studying in a university library, when he overhears someone ask nervously whether the rioting in the streets has been authorized. If it is, that means they can go see what’s happening; if not, they must stay put. Alexsi thinks, This could only happen here.

Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons)

While reading A Single Spy, I thought often of Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers, another excellent thriller about the training and adventures of an NKVD agent. Christie takes a different approach, making Alexsi’s education a tutorial affair rather than at a school among inquisitive classmates, probably essential to the scheme, because it allows the spy-in-training to keep his inner self private. But the novels are similar in at least two respects. Both rely on atmosphere, and both introduce plenty of sex. Christie even has Alexsi’s training include it, in a chilling scene that I find hard to believe and suspect was included for its titillation. The only other false note is how Aleksi, as a junior agent in Berlin, manages to be told certain monumental secrets from none other than Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the Abwehr.

But these are quibbles. Overall, A Single Spy satisfies in many ways.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lethal Delusions: The German War

17 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945, by Nicholas Stargardt
Basic, 2015. 570 pp. $35

Some books, no matter how harrowing their subject, how unrelenting, or how complex, display such mastery, vivid detail, and fresh perspective that they demand a reading. To me, The German War is one, though I shuddered and cringed my way through, sometimes cursing or even shouting in anger. That’s what happens when terrible history feels as if it took place yesterday.

Stargardt, who teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford, asks a question that many other historians have posed: How did the German people feel about the war they waged between 1939 and 1945?

That deceptively simple inquiry involves many interlocking pieces, among them the Holocaust, Allied bombing, euthanasia, rationing, German leadership, and Nazi ideology. Stargardt covers these and more, plumbing private letters, government documents, newspapers, film, and court cases. Perhaps most revealing about public attitudes, he cites reports from the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security arm of the SS, which gathered what people were saying among themselves. Having sifted through this stunning amount of material, the author conveys not only the implications of political and military decisions at the highest level, but how they affected the lives of sixteen individual Germans, in their own words.

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Stargardt has a myth-busting mission, which at times makes his narrative more than a little polemical. However, I think he succeeds, and it would be picky to condemn him for imperfect pitch when he shows why the most popular, accepted tunes are based on flat notes.

For instance, he demonstrates how the overwhelming majority of Germans supported both Hitler and the war effort, even to the end, even if they felt no sympathy with Nazism. This can be hard to understand, because most foreigners have grown up believing–or being taught–that the Nazis had somehow “brainwashed” an entire nation, that Germans obeyed out of fear, and that merely a fraction knew about the crimes committed in their names, let alone perpetrated them.

Not so, says Stargardt. Hitler was widely revered, and his radio broadcasts warmed the populace, lending them strength to bear ever-increasing sacrifices, even in the war’s final weeks. Many people assumed that if he’d only known of the daily injustices and hardships they suffered, he’d have corrected them. (The SD, as the Propaganda Ministry insisted, tolerated grumbling, so long as it betrayed no disloyalty.) Nobody welcomed the outbreak of war in 1939, except for the few who thought it an adventure, but, on the other hand, nobody questioned that the war was necessary to break the stranglehold of enemies threatening to destroy the Reich. Devout Christians, Catholic or Protestant, may have deplored the Nazi scorn for religion, but they agreed that Jews, as part of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy,” must be destroyed. Even in the last weeks, German forces bled freely for every inch of ground they yielded, as they had for almost six years. That tenacious, steadfast bravery could not have come from fear. Rather, the nation was determined not to surrender, as it had in 1918. Many fought on past the point of hopelessness to wipe away what they considered that old stain on the national honor.

As for what would later be called the Holocaust, the German public learned about it early and often. Not only did Hitler publicly promise on several occasions that Jewry would be wiped out, but on the Eastern Front, the army took part in mass killings, which were treated as perfectly natural. Soldiers described them in letters and took photos, which they showed to friends and family. The home front heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so forth as death camps, though exactly how they functioned remained secret. Few people even cared until Allied air raids began causing serious destruction and loss of life, at which time many Germans assumed that these were retribution for killing Jews. Many also believed that the Jews were behind the raids, whose perceived intent was to exterminate Germany. By the same logic, Germans implicitly accepted that they were victims, not perpetrators, and even after 1945, insisted they had fought a legitimate war of self-defense. Some 37 percent still believed that their security had demanded the murder of “non-Aryans.”

If there’s one thing missing in Stargardt’s account–hard to believe, given its length and depth–it’s how certain German attitudes remained unchanged from the First World War. The notion that Britain had conspired to “encircle” and “strangle” Germany out of jealousy dates from then, as do the mantra of a defensive war compelling invasion of other countries and the belief in German victimhood. Hitler didn’t have to fabricate these popular narratives, only recall them from his own days as an ardent soldier in a Bavarian regiment.

The German War can be hard going because of its subject matter. But I’m glad I read it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Confusion: The Aftermath

11 Thursday Jun 2015

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Review: The Aftermath, by Rhidian Brook
Knopf, 2013. 267 pp. $26

Brook starts with a terrific premise and mines its thematic possibilities with skill. It’s 1946, and Col. Lewis Morgan, a decorated career officer, has been posted to Hamburg to govern its British zone. His wife, Rachael, and their thirteen-year-old son join him there, occupying a splendid house, one of the few left standing in that shattered city. But hanging over their long-awaited reunion is the memory of the Morgans’ elder son, killed in a German bombing raid. Rachael has never recovered and seems not to want to; Lew pushes his grief aside, throwing himself into his all-consuming job, earning German trust while helping the defeated enemy rebuild.

 

Royal Air Force canteen, occupied Germany, 1946 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Royal Air Force canteen, occupied Germany, 1946 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Scorning the rules against fraternizing with civilians, Morgan invites the Lubert family living in the house, father and daughter, to remain. The place is large enough, and Lew’s convinced the Luberts weren’t Nazis, so why create another homeless family? But Rachael is furious. Share living space with the people who killed her boy?

Meanwhile, Lew tries to govern with a light hand, dispensing kindness and common sense. But much of the job involves identifying those civilians who belonged to the secret police or were otherwise tainted, an exceptionally difficult task, for which his subordinates think he’s much too trusting. Like Rachael, they assume everyone’s guilty, so that Lew faces unrest at headquarters as well as at home. Every scene asks who’s to blame: If it’s not the woman who kept company with a Nazi bigwig, the starving children who thieve to stay alive, or the factory workers spreading dissension, then who? And is every death equivalent, or does that of Rachael’s boy really matter less or more than anyone else’s?

I wish The Aftermath had stayed with these absorbing questions, to which reason and feeling sometimes offer conflicting answers. However, the novel betrays its characters, and the only reason I can see is to pursue an even larger theme, redemption, capital R. To explain, I’ll have to reveal (sorry) what most readers will probably guess from the jacket flap, if not the situation: Rachael winds up in Lubert’s arms. The encounters are so passionate and satisfying, the two former enemies enact their own forgiveness and dream of a new life together.

Hold on. Lew’s a maddeningly distant husband–no argument there–more so because he’s off acting like a saint at work. This feels true to life; somebody’s got to pay for all that goodness. But we never see why he’s emotionally absent, and Rachael never asks. Since he wasn’t always withdrawn, maybe his wartime service changed him. And since they’ve spent almost the entire war apart, except for their boy’s funeral, maybe she might try to draw him out, especially given his reticence. But Rachael doesn’t talk at all, while expecting him to help her, somehow. But of course he doesn’t, so after a few months of painful, uneasy silence, she betrays him, which feels rather quick, as if she’d already given up on him before she arrived in Hamburg. I find it hard to sympathize with her. Or either of them, actually.

Then again, few of these relationships make psychological sense to me. Rachael’s grief is such that she neglects her surviving son–okay–but the boy somehow never catches on that his mother prefers his dead brother. Seems to me he’d try harder to get her attention. Brook also undercuts his hero by setting a cardboard villain against him–Major Burnham, the intelligence officer who hates all Germans, is even nastier drunk than sober, and corrupt, besides. The author would have done much better to switch his character with Lew’s, while keeping their politics intact. That would have added depth to both while giving Rachael more grounds to take up with Lubert.

And what a guy Lubert is, repaying Lew’s kindness by cuckolding him and, with lip service to guilt, acting as if Lew deserves it. Like Rachael, he’s a clueless parent, thinking his fifteen-year-old daughter merely rebellious and angry when she’s plainly disturbed. It’s hard to pull for him, either, so the redemptive love is hardly that, and by this time, the reader’s looking for help.

Much happens in The Aftermath that’s worth thinking about. But the characters seem to exist only in the moment, and the end wraps up loose ends all too quickly.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

No Time for Morality: Motherland

30 Thursday Apr 2015

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Review: Motherland, by Maria Hummel

Counterpoint, 2014. 375 pp. $26

The year 1944 is coming to a screaming, bloody close in Germany, but the war goes on, demanding ever more sacrifice. Frank Kappus, a reconstructive surgeon in Hannesburg, a spa town outside Frankfurt, has been drafted to an army hospital in Weimar. Two months widowed, he has remarried so that his three sons, the youngest of whom is an infant, have a mother to care for them while he’s gone.

Liesl, his new bride, must feed, clothe, and bring up three children who don’t know her. Food and clothing are impossible to find; air raids worsen life every day; the two elder boys run wild; and the neighbors treat her with suspicion and dislike, glad to tell her that she’s nothing like her beautiful, friendly, fun-loving predecessor. She’s done nothing wrong, but of course, that’s not enough. “The point was to be liked, or if you couldn’t be liked, to be overlooked.” And Liesel sticks out, leading people to wonder what secrets she has to protect.

One secret concerns eight-year-old Anselm (called Ani), the middle child, already young for his years, who’s been acting strangely, showing signs of cognitive damage, if not mental disturbance. A doctor has told Liesl that Ani may need to be evaluated at Hadamar, a psychiatric hospital where, it is whispered, the unfit are put to death. Frank Winkelmann Hadamar What Liesl does to keep him and her two other boys safe requires a remarkable degree of inner strength, which, she realizes, may vanish in an unguarded moment. Like the fine novelist she is, Hummel has set herself and her protagonist a tall task, for Liesl isn’t quite cut out for struggle. She grew up in her aunt and uncle’s home, treated like a servant among her six cousins:

Liesl had excelled at gratitude. She ate it for supper, always the last to be served. She wore it on her back, always clothed in her aunt’s stained, cast-off jumpers. She listened to it all night, positioned as nurse outside each incoming baby’s room, ordered to wake if he cried.

Meanwhile, Frank has his own troubles. He plans to desert if the Russians break through, only a matter of time, but that’s a deadly game. His superior, Captain Schnell (!) seems more devoted to punishing subversion than running a hospital, and when Frank hears a rumor that the medical officer at nearby Buchenwald may be infecting the inmates with typhus, Schnell warns him not to be curious. Frank takes the hint.

I admire much about Motherland, a novel head and shoulders above the other two I’ve reviewed here about wartime Germany (City of Women, David R. Gilham, December 11, 2014; The Undertaking, Audrey Magee, March 19). Hummel can make even a visit to the kitchen a tense occasion, and she captures the atmosphere of fear and deprivation without resorting to cartoon Nazis or melodrama. She’s also an excellent prose stylist. Women’s faces “looked as if someone had fixed their dread in stone.” Dust gathers on furniture, “as if it were ever so slowly growing a beard.” It’s details like these, rooted firmly in the mundane, that tell the story of day-to-day survival.

Yet Hummel lets her characters off the moral hook, despite her best efforts. She explains that she based her novel on family history, notably a series of letters that say nothing about the death camps or the totalitarian state, only about trying to cope. Okay. She resisted the temptation to allow her characters acts of resistance–wisely, I think–and says it hurt to leave out all but scant references to Jews or the Holocaust. (One brilliant, subtle description evokes the death camps and crematoria in a different, unexpected context.)

Fair enough. I accept that ordinary people, just trying to remain overlooked, would focus instead on where their next meal was coming from, especially when the bombs are falling. However, it’s those bombs that Liesl doesn’t think about, as in why Germany’s enemies are so relentless, or why the war has lasted so long. Nor does she ever connect the dots between the laws that may send Ani to Hadamar and those that condemn Jews.

Buchenwald was built in 1937, the first such camp on German soil, so Frank can’t be completely ignorant of what its purpose is, even if he’s never heard that inmates are injected with typhus. But he simply doesn’t think about it. Nor does he ever stop to consider that the horribly maimed men he treats have their counterparts on the other side. Nor, more broadly, does he reflect on what war has done to Europe.

Nevertheless, I could settle with this–in fact, I did, for almost the whole novel–except for the outrage that Liesl, in particular, expresses against the Americans. What they do is so unjust and heavy-handed, she believes, and I sense that the reader is meant to sympathize with her. But I can’t, not about this. Liesl never grapples with anyone else’s sufferings or how they might have come about. To me, Hummel squanders the empathy for Liesl and Frank that she’s so carefully built.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

The Sorrows of Young Werner: All the Light We Cannot See

30 Monday Mar 2015

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Review: All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr
Scribner, 2014. 531 pp. $27.

I started reading this World War II novel with some skepticism, and I confess, the first several chapters made me wonder whether I’d like it, despite all the raves. What’s the deal with snippet-length chapters? Some feel like television–short scene, nifty tag line, go to break. Also, I’m prejudiced against stories that mix fables, especially the kind of scenes that filmmakers shoot with Vaseline on the lenses, with cruel reality. And though the first stretch of All the Light We Cannot See took bold steps, many landed mighty close to the puddles of treacle that kept gathering, the just-this-side-of-sentimentality that reminded me of Thornton Wilder on a good day.

Saint-Malo, Brittany. (Courtesy Antoine Declerck, via Wikimedia Commons).

Saint-Malo, Brittany. (Courtesy Antoine Declerck, via Wikimedia Commons)

Finally, few novelists have ever reached me with a story in which characters from very different walks of life happen to cross paths. Mark Helprin, for one, handles this skillfully, as he did with In Sunlight and in Shadow, because he takes randomness seriously as a theme. But when I picked up All the Light We Cannot See (again, light in the title), I’d just finished Adam Foulds’s In the Wolf’s Mouth (reviewed March 12), whose randomness felt merely trotted out, not explored.

But what do you know? I wound up devouring All the Light We Cannot See, and though I have reservations, I’m now probably the zillionth reviewer to recommend it. The story concerns Werner, a young, unschooled German orphan who’s taught himself electronics and a good hunk of mechanical engineering, and who’s such a prodigy that an institute for pure-bred Nazis takes him as a cadet. Meanwhile, Marie-Laure, a blind French girl whose father is a locksmith at the Paris museum of natural history–and who somehow isn’t in school–learns science from the museum staff and by reading Jules Verne in Braille.

This is the fable part, in which the world largely smiles on Marie-Laure and glares at Werner, as they run up against life’s choices. But as Marie-Laure learns from the protagonist of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, “logic, reason, pure science: these . . . are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.”

Accordingly, All the Light We Cannot See starts taking a harder line, with powerful results. Werner has only one friend at his Nazi institute, a dreamy bird-watcher, whom the others abuse as a scapegoat, and whom Werner does nothing to protect. The friend’s sufferings foreshadow the pact Werner has made with a devil who’ll demand that he use what he’s learned to kill people he’s never met. Werner tries to pretend that he’s there to celebrate pure science, but underneath, he knows better, a conflict that sharpens once the war sweeps him up. Meanwhile, the Germans invade France, and Marie-Laure’s father spirits her to his uncle’s house in St.-Malo, on the Breton coast. As the occupation tightens, and daily life becomes more threatening and dangerous, she too puts herself on the line.

I like how Doerr portrayed his two main characters; Marie-Laure’s father and great-uncle; and Werner’s institute friend. But most of the large cast feel like shadow figures, even though they command my attention by what they do. As with TV again, they fall into two categories, good and bad, and there’s never any doubt to which group they belong. However, Doerr can tell a story, eye-blink chapters or not, and the intricacies that lead to the ordained meeting between Werner and Marie-Laure compel you to turn the pages. I also like the theme of searching for light, in the mind or in reality, and what that metaphor means–warmth, delight, knowledge, freedom, humanity, love.

And then there’s the prose:

In the lurid, flickering light, he sees that the airplane was not alone, that the sky teems with them, a dozen swooping back and forth . . . and in a moment of disorientation, he feels that he’s looking not up but down, as though a spotlight has been shined into a wedge of bloodshot water . . . and the airplanes are hungry fish, harrying their prey in the dark.

All the Light We Cannot See is a beautifully written exploration of how war and greed twist people, and with which there’s no such thing as compromise.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

“A Promising Future”: Jack of Spies, by David Downing

29 Thursday Jan 2015

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Review: Jack of Spies, by David Downing
Soho, 2014. 338 pp. $28

“The automobile business,” muses Jack McColl, the engaging British protagonist of this excellent thriller, “was not what it had been even two years before. . . . Spying, on the other hand, seemed an occupation with a promising future.”

If nothing else, Jack is prescient, for the year is 1913, and the infant secret services of Britain and Germany are gearing up for a war of which most Europeans have no inkling. It will be a global war, he senses, and indeed, his first assignment is to track German warships that have put in at Tsingtau, a German colony in China with its requisite population of spies. Jack’s being watched more carefully than he knows.

The harbor at Tsingtau, 1912. (Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Bild 116-424-127 / CC-BY-SA)

The harbor at Tsingtau, 1912. (Courtesy Bundesarchiv, Bild 116-424-127 / CC-BY-SA)

But he enjoys a dash of danger. Further, he realizes that selling luxury automobiles, his main job, will soon go the way of the dodo, thanks to Henry Ford and his Model T. Jack wants–or thinks he wants–a full-time position with his espionage organization, vaguely connected to the British Admiralty. But he goes back and forth, because his work to protect the empire challenges his political and moral beliefs in the rights of the poor and disenfranchised.

Already, this feels like new ground: a would-be spy who reflects on the bodies that fall in his wake. He tries to reconcile what he’s seen and done with the more abstract threat from German militarism and its leaders’ disrespect for the rights of others, and sometimes, he comes up empty. Even better, Jack’s work conflicts with his passion for the exquisite Caitlin Hanley, an American journalist he meets in China; among other tasks, he’s assigned to investigate links between German agents and Irish separatists whom Caitlin’s family supports. Her combination of progressive politics, will to change the world, and career ambition have smitten him, but for once, this is a spy novel in which the hero worries that the woman of his dreams doesn’t love him. She likely won’t if she learns who he really is.

Then there’s the spy stuff, which Jack has to learn on the job. He’s a quick study, but his opponents sometimes outwit him, and he has several narrow escapes. His social gifts and ability to speak nine languages let him assume false identities with relative ease. But he also feels out of his depth, which makes him human, a refreshingly anti-James Bond. Like the prototypical spy, Jack trots the world, from China to San Francisco to New York and beyond, but Downing’s grasp of history keeps the travel suitably difficult and the connections unreliable.

A few critics have taken the author to task, saying that he should concentrate on Jack’s on-the-job training and damp down the history. Fie, say I, and not just because I’m a historian of that era and love that stuff. Jack and Caitlin read newspapers avidly because they care deeply about politics, also the hub of their respective professions. I never felt as if they were batting headlines back and forth to dump information on the reader or paint a backdrop.

As for historical accuracy, it’s impressive, especially considering the wealth of detail. The narrative does suggest that conscription existed in Britain then, which isn’t true (not until 1916), and Jack’s surveillance of a German agent in New York would have been hampered by having to crank his Model T to start the engine.

But these nits are worth mentioning only because of discussions I’ve seen recently in the blogosphere that even one petty detail got wrong can ruin a book. Really? There isn’t a historian writing today who doesn’t accept the chances of error, so why should novelists be held to a higher standard? Imagination trumps pedantry, any day.

Sorry for my digression. Read Jack of Spies. You won’t be disappointed.

Disclaimer: I borrowed my reading copy of this book from the public library.