Robert Littell was a journalist before he was an author, reporting on Soviet stuff during the Cold War, mainly for Newsweek. And guess what? This novel, his debut, is about Cold War spy type stuff. One can only assume that the many others he subsequently produced plough similar furrows.
The plot centres on the defection to the USSR of an American scientist named A.J. Lewinter. He may have some very secret secrets to do with American missiles stored in his brain, ready to spill. He may not. The Americans and Russians both try to work out whether or not he does, and whether or not the other lot think he does, and what they ought to think given what they think the other lot think, and what they ought to gull the other lot into thinking given what they themselves think.
That’s a pretty neat setup, and the sense of intelligence as a grand guessing game premised on ego as much as espionage comes through strongly. You might well wonder whether the book is really an account of what the author strongly suspects happens behind the locked doors of Washington and the Iron Curtain: the story he wishes he could publish in Newsweek, given the sources and the editorial nerve.
I found the book engaging enough without being entirely taken with it. It has some obvious problems, not least an astonishing superfluity of named characters, several of whom introduce themselves or each other with laboured (auto)biographical paragraphs of dialogue. I counted 12 characters at least in the first 30 pages, and then gave up counting, or paying attention to who all these people were, as more and more proliferated. The alternation of action between the USA and USSR works well structurally. But the Russian chapters seem speculative, while the American ones are more obviously realistic, written from knowledge rather than guesswork. This makes for an uneven tone, which is further unbalanced by a slight air of whimsy that makes the rather grim ending hard to land. Le Carré is mining the same seam of cynicism about spying, its methods and its ends, in The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. But he starts, continues, and ends in the same tough, bleak register. That makes the cynicism compelling. Here, it seems more like a posture taken by someone who actually, at bottom, finds it all pretty exciting: someone who, above all, wants to know what happens in the rooms where it happens.
Overall, I would pick up another Littell book if it fell into my hands, but I’m not going to seek them out.