Complexity brings rewards
By Ben Macintyre |
April 6, 2012, Friday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
COMRADE Colonel Xin Zhu, obese spy and head of the Expedition Agency within the Sixth Bureau of the Ministry of State Security, suspects there is a CIA mole burrowing into China's secrets. But he is under threat from Wu Liang and his ally Yang Qingnian of the Supervision and Liaison Committee, an offshoot of the Central Committee's Political and Legislative Affairs Committee. Zhu believes Zhang Guo of the Supreme People's Procuratorate is on his side, probably, but he is less sure of the veteran schemer Comrade Lieutenant General Sun Bingjun.
If this plethora of Chinese names and Chinese bureaucracies is a little daunting, that's exactly the intention of Olen Steinhauer, a spy novelist who refuses to make it easy for his readers but rewards them richly in the end. Not for Steinhauer the simple, linear march of the traditional thriller. Rather, he drops the reader (and his characters) into situations of the most mind-bending complexity and forces them to work things out for themselves.
Not since John le Carre has a writer so vividly evoked the multilayered, multifaceted, deeply paranoid world of espionage, in which identities and allegiances are malleable and ever shifting, the mirrors of loyalty and betrayal reflecting one another to infinity. In this intensely clever, sometimes baffling book, it's never quite clear who is manipulating whom, and which side is up.
In his earlier novels "The Tourist" and "The Nearest Exit," Steinhauer introduced the Department of Tourism, a black-ops cell within the CIA. At the start of "An American Spy," Xin Zhu has sent the Tourists packing by luring some 33 of them to their deaths in a coordinated global hit. Out for revenge, the former head of the department, Alan Drummond, is determined to recruit Milo Weaver, one of the few surviving Tourists and the dour, damaged hero of Steinhauer's two previous books.
But Weaver is trying to give it all up - the drink, the cigarettes, the spying, the lying - to spend time with an adored daughter, restore a marriage and recover from the latest attempt to kill him. When Drummond disappears and then Milo's family vanishes, he is tricked back into the game, to his annoyance. "You forgot that no one is above deception," he admonishes himself. "You became as naive as all the other civilians."
Behind the distortions lie multiple self-deceptions. Even the most powerful are fallible. Zhu believes his annihilation of the Department of Tourism is righteous vengeance for the death of his only son, preferring not to face the guilty truth that his young new wife, feeding him dumplings in their apartment high above Beijing, was formerly his daughter-in-law.
Weaver can beat a man to pulp in an airport washroom as effectively as the next spy, but he's no James Bond: He forgets to put salt in his cooking; he glumly chews nicotine gum. The fat Chinese spy is playing Weaver, and being played himself, because the spies are pawns of the spymasters in Washington and Beijing. "It's extremely messy," Zhu says, with understatement.
Where Steinhauer's fiction succeeds masterfully is in the portrayal of one reality from different, deceptive angles, transferring his characters' indecision and uncertainty to the page. Everyone lies, for different reasons. The picture is opaque.
I don't know if Steinhauer was ever a spy but he certainly has the right name for it. Gustav Steinhauer was Kaiser Wilhelm's spy chief during World War I. Perhaps they are related. Someone should ask him. But I doubt you'd get a straight answer.
If this plethora of Chinese names and Chinese bureaucracies is a little daunting, that's exactly the intention of Olen Steinhauer, a spy novelist who refuses to make it easy for his readers but rewards them richly in the end. Not for Steinhauer the simple, linear march of the traditional thriller. Rather, he drops the reader (and his characters) into situations of the most mind-bending complexity and forces them to work things out for themselves.
Not since John le Carre has a writer so vividly evoked the multilayered, multifaceted, deeply paranoid world of espionage, in which identities and allegiances are malleable and ever shifting, the mirrors of loyalty and betrayal reflecting one another to infinity. In this intensely clever, sometimes baffling book, it's never quite clear who is manipulating whom, and which side is up.
In his earlier novels "The Tourist" and "The Nearest Exit," Steinhauer introduced the Department of Tourism, a black-ops cell within the CIA. At the start of "An American Spy," Xin Zhu has sent the Tourists packing by luring some 33 of them to their deaths in a coordinated global hit. Out for revenge, the former head of the department, Alan Drummond, is determined to recruit Milo Weaver, one of the few surviving Tourists and the dour, damaged hero of Steinhauer's two previous books.
But Weaver is trying to give it all up - the drink, the cigarettes, the spying, the lying - to spend time with an adored daughter, restore a marriage and recover from the latest attempt to kill him. When Drummond disappears and then Milo's family vanishes, he is tricked back into the game, to his annoyance. "You forgot that no one is above deception," he admonishes himself. "You became as naive as all the other civilians."
Behind the distortions lie multiple self-deceptions. Even the most powerful are fallible. Zhu believes his annihilation of the Department of Tourism is righteous vengeance for the death of his only son, preferring not to face the guilty truth that his young new wife, feeding him dumplings in their apartment high above Beijing, was formerly his daughter-in-law.
Weaver can beat a man to pulp in an airport washroom as effectively as the next spy, but he's no James Bond: He forgets to put salt in his cooking; he glumly chews nicotine gum. The fat Chinese spy is playing Weaver, and being played himself, because the spies are pawns of the spymasters in Washington and Beijing. "It's extremely messy," Zhu says, with understatement.
Where Steinhauer's fiction succeeds masterfully is in the portrayal of one reality from different, deceptive angles, transferring his characters' indecision and uncertainty to the page. Everyone lies, for different reasons. The picture is opaque.
I don't know if Steinhauer was ever a spy but he certainly has the right name for it. Gustav Steinhauer was Kaiser Wilhelm's spy chief during World War I. Perhaps they are related. Someone should ask him. But I doubt you'd get a straight answer.
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