Len Deighton stays behind the Wall
CHARITY Len Deighton HarperCollins $195 This is the final part of the third Bernard Samson trilogy and the last of the 10 novels dealing with Samson and his friends and enemies in a Berlin where the wall has not yet come down.
It begins in the early days of 1988. Samson, the tough British Secret Intelligence Service agent, is still trying to repair his marriage to Fiona, following her dramatic escape from East Germany where she was working undercover.
He also wants to get to the bottom of the death of his sister-in-law Tessa Kosinski, but his bosses at London Central want the case closed and fear that his search for justice is becoming a dangerous obsession.
Samson suspects a cover-up and when a colleague is discovered brutally murdered in Wimbledon, he realises that his own life could be in danger. Now he wonders who he can trust. Even his oldest friend, Werner Volkmann, seems to know more than he is telling.
When the cold war ended and the wall came down, espionage writers found themselves with a seemingly insoluble dilemma.
Now that the enemies had melted from the scene of battle and the symbol of their hatred was being dismantled brick by brick, where did the spy writers go? Len Deighton decided his best option was to leave the genre altogether and find fresh pastures. His experiment failed. Whereas the atmospheric books of Harry Palmer and Bernard Samson were made all the more powerful by Deighton's empathy with and knowledge of Berlin, in MaMista, his damp squib of a thriller set in Latin America, he was like a lost tourist without a good map.
It says a lot for his power as a writer that he can take us back to pre-unification Germany and still hold our attention with this gripping work.
One of Deighton's greatest strengths is his ability to take the wealth of research that goes into each of his books, and weave it into the novel so that it unobtrusively becomes part of the plot.
He knows his terrain and he makes you feel a part of it rather than an unwelcome intruder. The Berlin that Bernard Samson inhabits is so lovingly evoked that you wish you were there, especially now that it no longer exists.
Samson reminds me of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, and that's about the highest compliment I can pay a fictional character. He's tough but compassionate, hates killing but is a perfect marksman, despises his public school bosses and all intellectuals, but speaks four languages. Best of all and so much like Marlowe, his caustic one-liners are priceless.
Like an actor making a disappointing re-appearance in the role that made him famous after his career had flagged, I feared that Deighton might have returned to the well to drink once too often. Fortunately, this is not the case, there is enough mayhem in Bernard Samson's life to warrant this trilogy.
My only reservation is with Deighton's claim, in the forward to Charity, that each book can stand alone. His effort to make this possible can sometimes lead to intrusive repetition and besides, the reader will lose something by reading the third of the trilogy in isolation.