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["Katia M. Peltekian" <[email protected]>: The Great Game gone]

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  • ["Katia M. Peltekian" <[email protected]>: The Great Game gone]

    --Boundary_(ID_/bX+yctlErdmIzI9cdswCg)
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    From: "Katia M. Peltekian" &lt;[email protected]&gt;
    Subject: The Great Game gone
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    New Yorker, NY
    June 6 2005

    THE GREAT GAME GONE

    by JOHN UPDIKE

    The post-Cold War spy novel.
    Issue of 2005-06-13 and 20
    Posted 2005-06-06


    The spy thriller still pines for the Soviet Union. No post-Iron
    Curtain intrigue, no replay of the British Empire's Great Game in
    Afghanistan or its intrusions into the Middle East, no elaborate
    `security measures,' no double-double cross in the murk of
    C.I.A.-F.B.I. rivalry can match, for heart-stoppingly high
    geopolitical stakes, the good old days when, in terms of John le
    Carré's fiction, M.I.6's Smiley matched wits with the K.G.B.'s Karla
    on the global chessboard. There was an intelligibility if not a
    friendly intimacy in the old contest, one between two large,
    idealistic, rough-mannered nations seeking to maintain their spheres
    of influence short of tripping nuclear war. As one hardened
    undercover functionary cozily tells another in Robert Littell's new
    book, `Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation' (Overlook; $25.95), `We all
    came of age in the cold war. We all fought the good fight. I'm sure
    we can work something out.' The so-called war on terror has no such
    surety; `working out' is just what the other side, or sides, doesn't
    want. Littell conscientiously covers the new ground - the post-Soviet
    Russia of the oligarchs; the potential for financial shenanigans
    opened up by worldwide computerization; the stagnant antipathy
    between Israel and its neighbors; Bosnia; Chechnya; and (news to me)
    an international smugglers' cove where the borders of Paraguay,
    Brazil, and Argentina meet and whores dance sleepily in one another's
    arms - but he remains most excited by, and most at home with, occupants
    of the old U.S.S.R. as they strike up fresh relations with capitalism
    and the C.I.A.

    Littell, a former Newsweek reporter now resident in France, began his
    career as a fictional spymaster with `The Defection of A. J.
    Lewinter: A Novel of Duplicity' (1973), a deft and lighthearted
    performance on the edge of parody, and capped it, a dozen books
    later, with the best-selling magnum opus `The Company: A Novel of the
    C.I.A.' (2002), a nostalgic recapitulation, in nearly nine hundred
    pages, of the Cold War intelligence marathon from 1950 to 1995.
    Littell is not the only author to scent an epic here; Norman Mailer's
    giant, possibly ongoing saga `Harlot's Ghost' deals also with this
    secretive struggle and evokes the striking historical figure of
    gaunt, erudite James Jesus Angleton, for some twenty years the head
    of C.I.A. counterintelligence. `Legends,' though falling short of
    Tolstoyan, or Maileresque, amplitude, does not scant, expertly
    roaming the continents and offering a psychological puzzle to go with
    all the deception and violence.

    Martin Odum, to give the novel's confusing hero his most often used
    name, is an ex-C.I.A. operative who has, he feels, lost his real
    identity in the shuffle of `legends' - false identities, with carefully
    worked-out histories and trade skills, assumed for particular
    episodes of espionage. Odum has paid a personal price for doing his
    devious patriotic duty: he suffers from migraine headaches; his
    occasional lover finds her side of their relationship `like
    sleepwalking through a string of one-night stands that were
    physically satisfying but emotionally frustrating'; he plans to spend
    the rest of his life, he confesses to her, `boring himself to death.'
    The C.I.A. retired him after his psychoanalysis at the taxpayers'
    expense was abruptly terminated. His diagnosis was MPD,
    multiplepersonality disorder. Along with his well-remembered roles of
    Dante Pippen, an I.R.A. dynamiter training Hezbollah jihadists in
    Lebanon, and Lincoln Dittman, a Civil War buff doubling as an arms
    dealer in Brazil, there are hints of a legend, an alter ego, beyond
    his memory's reach. These impersonations having served their
    dangerous purpose, and Odum having outlived his usefulness to the
    C.I.A., he makes ends meet as a private detective in the Crown
    Heights section of Brooklyn, using two pool tables as his office
    furniture. Well, one day in walks this dame called Stella, wearing a
    long raincoat and `a ghost of a smile' on her lips . . .

    It's a long story, and Littell should be allowed to tell it, twist
    after twist after twist. This reviewer put up some initial resistance
    against the plot's ruthless manipulations of chronological sequence,
    the arch chapter titles (`1997: Oskar Alexandrovich Kastner Discovers
    the Weight of a Cigarette'), the excessively vivid verbs (`The
    jetliner elbowed through the towering clouds'; `He heard Stella's
    voice breasting the static'), the occasional fusillade of clichés
    (`He must have been off his rocker to think he could trace a husband
    who had jumped ship. Finding a needle in a haystack would be child's
    play by comparison'), the clammy, overcooked atmospherics (`eyes
    burning with excitement'; `the muscles on her face contorting with
    heartache'), and the heavy-breathing ruminations about identity, that
    critical modern problem. Almost all the characters, including stray
    taxi-drivers and hookers (maybe especially hookers, adept at
    dissimulation and undercover work), are pretending to be somebody
    else, under another name. In a `nightmarish world,' we are left to
    conclude, `people who are broken have several selves.' Why does this
    theme feel tired? Is it just the Jason Bourne movies, starring Matt
    Damon?

    But, as I rounded page 300 and headed into the book's last quarter,
    the pieces of the puzzle began to click together and I felt myself
    sinking into an earlier assumed identity: I became a
    fourteen-year-old boy lying on a red cane-back sofa in Pennsylvania
    eating peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwiches (a site-specific ethnic
    treat) and reading one mystery novel after another. Not just
    mysteries - Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, Ngaio
    Marsh, Erle Stanley Gardner - but an occasional international thriller,
    like Eric Ambler's `A Coffin for Dimitrios' and Graham Greene's `The
    Third Man.' The idea of reading a non-genre novel, with its stodgy
    domestic realism and sissy fuss over female heartbreak, repelled me,
    but I could lose myself all morning and afternoon in narratives of
    skulduggery, detection, and eventual triumphant justice. And so, to
    judge from the best-seller lists, can millions still. Thrillers, as
    we shall call them, offer the reader a firm contract: there will be
    violent events, we will go places our parents didn't take us, the
    protagonist will conquer and survive, and social order will, however
    temporarily, be restored. The reader's essential safety, as he
    reclines on his red sofa, will not be breached. The world around him
    and the world he reads about remain distinct; the partition between
    them is not undermined by any connection to depths within himself. At
    this same age, I remember, I looked into Joyce's `Ulysses' and
    Orwell's `1984' and was badly shaken by the unmistakable impression
    that these suffocating, inescapable worlds were the same one I lived
    in.

    To complain of thrillers, or romances, that they are less than real
    is to invite several counter-charges. It could be said that a book
    like `Legends' consummately achieves a novel's basic purpose,
    implicit in its name, of bearing news. Littell, a former reporter, is
    generous in the amount of data he provides about not just guns,
    explosives, and the procedures of terrorism (how to plant a bomb in a
    dead dog), the battle of Fredericksburg, the Civil War nursing career
    of Walt (known to his soldier friends as Walter) Whitman, chess,
    Lithuanian history, Russian as spoken with a Polish accent, and so
    on; he persuasively conjures up a desolate ruined island in the sadly
    depleted Aral Sea, top-secret conference rooms in Washington and Tel
    Aviv, and a medically vivid simulacrum of Osama bin Laden. Facts,
    fascinating facts, are the bones of his fable, and who doubts that
    the C.I.A. really exists and that describing how nations and
    corporate entities relate to one another brings more important news
    than describing the relations of mere individuals? On the other hand,
    it could be argued that all fiction is escapist: by its means we
    escape our own heads and lives and enter into other heads and lives.
    Whether the head belongs to a Hobbit in Tolkien or to one of Virginia
    Woolf's sensitive, externally unadventurous women does not change the
    nature of the escape: what gives relief and pleasure in fiction is
    its otherness. It can hardly help being other, no two sets of
    experience being identical: an American finds in English fiction a
    different slant and social atmosphere, and a realistic Victorian
    novel like `Middlemarch' develops, as electricity and automobiles
    overtake reality, a refreshing strangeness.

    The slippery difference between a thriller and a non-thriller would
    hardly be worth groping for did not the thriller-writers themselves
    seem to be restive - chafing to escape, yearning for a less restrictive
    contract with the reader. They write longer than they used to, with
    more flourishes. Nothing in Agatha Christie's brilliantly compact,
    stylized, and efficient mysteries suggests that larger ambitions
    would have served her; the genre in its lean classic English form fit
    her like a cat burglar's thin black glove. But Littell and le Carré
    and the estimable P. D. James give signs of wanting to be `real'
    novelists, free to follow character where it takes them and to
    display their knowledge of the world without the obligation to
    provide a thrill in every chapter. The hero of `Legends' at times
    shows sympathetic depths but in the end turns into a killing machine
    as remorseless as the novel's savage opening vignette. The heroine
    never comes clearer than that ghost of a smile and the three shirt
    buttons she tends to leave undone. The villainess, Bondishly named
    Crystal Quest, chews ice, literally - cold-blooded, eh? The amorous
    dialogue, the little there is of it, feels painfully awkward, if not
    at bottom hostile, and the rest creaks like an oxcart under its
    burden of conveying data. A random sample:

    `In the early nineteen-eighties,' Kastner explained, `Ugor-Zhilov was
    a small-time hoodlum in a small pond - he ran a used-car dealership in
    Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. He had a KGB record: He'd been
    arrested in the early seventies for bribery and black market
    activities and sent to a gulag in the Kolyma Mountains for eight
    years' [and so on, for sixteen more lines of type].
    `You seem to know an awful lot about Tzvetan Ugor-Zhilov,' Martin
    observed.
    `I was the conducting officer in charge of the investigation into the
    Oligarkh's affairs.'
    Martin saw where the story was going. `I'll take a wild guess - he paid
    off the Sixth Directorate.'


    `Legends' patiently details the labor of espionage; in turn, the
    reading of it can be laborious. Various checkpoints of the intricate
    plot are repeated almost in toto, lest the reader carefreely lose
    track and, like a scholar in springtime, gaze out the window at the
    birds and trees of the non-espionage world. Espionage, this novel
    implies, borders on the tragic, hollowing out a man so that he no
    longer feels real to himself. The games the C.I.A. would play with
    the world take on, in the plot's developments, a megalomaniacal
    hubris. Littell, and history with him, has come a long way since
    1973, when `The Defection of A. J. Lewinter' marked his début. That
    novel is airy and comic, speedy and understated; it shares many grim
    ingredients with `Legends,' including a C.I.A. whose presumptuous
    meddling destroys lives, but it has a warmth in its portraits of
    Russia and individual Russians that extends to the American heroine
    and her romantic involvement in the machinations of the state. The
    passage of time, too, as with `Middlemarch,' has added a nostalgic
    patina. More than thirty years later, the mirvs and missile defense
    at the heart of the intrigues around Lewinter have faded from the
    foreground of our anxieties. The Cold War, surprisingly, had an end,
    and the U.S.-U.S.S.R. rivalry did not produce a nuclear holocaust.
    Now we fear not missiles sent forth by a government playing at
    brinkmanship but loosely sponsored suicide missions that turn
    passenger jets into missiles. An opaque seethe of religious animus
    and insatiable grievance has replaced the hidden counsels of the
    Kremlin, whose inhabitants, in softening retrospect, became over time
    fellow-conspirators of a sort, enemies whose fears and aspirations
    mirrored our own.
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