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Book review
By NEIL GORDON -
Published: August 21, 2005
Robert Littell is a veteran of the cold-war thriller of some 14 books' standing, including the widely admired ''Once and Future Spy'' and, most recently, ''The Company,'' many of them published by the maverick independent press Overlook. And while his novels have included plenty of cloak-and-dagger business, like the best genre fiction they rarely conform to the rules. His latest, ''Legends: A Novel of Dissimulation,'' contains no high-speed chases, no athletic sex, none of the things production-line spy novels make sure to include at regular intervals. When there is action -- a shooting, an F.B.I. raid, a C.I.A. operation -- it is recounted with a keen eye for the antiheroic and a sense of the ineptitude attendant on such things in the real world. The novel, introduced by quotations from Romain Gary and Bernard-Henri Lévy, moves with supreme assurance at its own pace, toward its own ends. Littell is clearly too old a dog to play to any audience other than himself.
It's always good to see a writer please himself, but Littell's focus on his higher purposes leaves, in its wake, far too much sloppiness, repetition, even overwriting. His attention seems to wander for long stretches, as if he doesn't care about the narrative's fictional scaffolding and is saving his talents for the denouement.
He expends, for example, little energy on furnishing his improbable hero with lifelike contours. Martin Odum, a retired C.I.A. agent living in Brooklyn and working as a private eye, has served in an unlikely variety of operations from the Khyber Pass to the Bekaa in Lebanon. With endless resources and expertise in tradecraft, he's also served in South America -- where he first made contact with bin Laden and discovered the existence of Al Qaeda. Now, on an afternoon in 1997, Martin is drawn back into the game when he is visited by an attractive woman who wants him to locate her missing brother-in-law, a noir set piece with a twist: the brother-in-law has disappeared from an Orthodox community in Israel, and the reason he must be found is to oblige him to grant a ''get'' (a religious divorce) to his abandoned wife so she may marry again.
Martin exists, in other words, in a kind of fantasy thriller -- a caricature not only of the actual nuts-and-bolts work of the national security apparatus but of the novelistic representation of that reality, with all its rules of authenticity and believability. Even a Czech interrogator, subjecting Martin to torture at one point, finds his credulity stretched by the simple truth of the novel's plot. ''I am familiar with the school of intelligence activities that holds that a good cover story must be made to seem preposterous if it is to be believed. But you are pushing this thesis to its limits.''
Which seems to be Littell's object, revealed by a number of absurdist details. His ex-C.I.A. boss is named Crystal Quest but known as Fred. Martin himself is so completely lost in the various ''legends,'' or false identities of his operational career, that he no longer knows which is real and which is a product of the ''Legend Committee'' at Langley. (The C.I.A., we're told, once gave a therapist security clearance to help Martin remember who he really was.)
So Martin sets out on an odyssey through a largely Jewish world, from Crown Heights to Israel to Prague, a quest in which his C.I.A. past collides with post-Soviet gangsters and the growing Islamist threat. Along the way he discovers a huge bioterrorism operation, and gets involved in a plot to repatriate the bones of a Lithuanian saint and another to recover Torah scrolls lost during the Holocaust. Bodies fall regularly, and the quarry, the errant brother-in-law, grows steadily more ambiguous until it is no longer clear who is chasing whom and why. Most important, a series of flashbacks allows the traumatic secret behind Martin's multiple personality disorder to bubble, slowly, frighteningly, to the surface.
If all this sounds like you've heard it before, you have. There's not much in this odd book that isn't done elsewhere, often by Littell himself: the serpentine explications of the C.I.A.; the depictions of post-Soviet gangsterism and the detailed recounting of tradecraft. But Littell seems unconcerned with originality or even verisimilitude. His interest, rather, is in the deeply human motivation behind Martin's dogged journey. Martin is conducting an investigation, sure, and that investigation will yield surprising results, both about its object and about our country. His true journey, though, is an interior one. ''As always, remembering a detail from Dante's past'' -- that is, the past of one of his own false identities -- ''reminded Martin that he, too, must have had a past, and this gave him a measure of hope that he could one day retrieve it.''
It is in this dimension of ''Legends'' that Littell travels enticingly close to territory largely unexplored in political fiction: the symmetry between the macroscopic movements of governments and the microscopic weapons with which the human psyche confronts reality. After all, essentially the same ''plausible deniability'' that President Reagan used to navigate the Iran-contra scandal is the star player in Freud's arsenal of neurotic defense mechanisms. Littell's investigation of his own dissembling hero helps unite some of the disjointed qualities of this ambitious, curious novel.
Neil Gordon is literary editor of Boston Review, chairman of the writing program at Eugene Lang College of New School University, and the author, most recently, of ''The Company You Keep,'' a novel. |
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