Christopher's Ghosts

Review of Old Boys and Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry
In anticipation of his new novel The Mulberry Bush
To be published in November

On the night that Paul Christopher vanished, he and I dined together at his house on O Street: cold watercress soup, very rare cold roast beef, undercooked asparagus, pears and cheese, a respectable bottle of Oregonian pinot noir. It was a fine evening in May. The windows were open. We smelled the azaleas in the garden and saw reflected in mirrors and window glass the last bruised colors of the sunset. There was nothing special about the occasion. Paul and I are cousins who live around the corner from each other, and before he went away we used to join up for dinner a couple of times a month. My name is Horace Christopher Hubbard. His middle name is Hubbard.

With that opening of The Old Boys, the spring is sprung and the plot begins to unwind – a plot that is part of a series of novels about three generations of the Christopher family from the beginning to the end of the 20th century and their involvement in espionage.

The six books in the series – The Miernik Dossier (1971), The Tears of Autumn (1974), an ingenious solution to the Kennedy Assassination, which has just been republished by The Overlook Press, The Secret Lovers (1977), The Last Supper (1983), Second Sight (1991), and Old Boys (2004) – are, like Patrick O’Brien’s Jack Aubrey series – really book-length chapters in one long novel, possibly the most ambitious roman fleuve written in America.

The action of The Old Boys, like that of the other novels in the Christopher series, ranges widely in time and space, from the present to Judea at the time of Christ, Washington, D.C., to Brazil, Tel Aviv, Moscow, and China, and betrays a deep and specific knowledge of Western, Eastern, and North African cultures – from the rites of a Georgetown dinner party to the rituals of early Christians to the kinship traditions of Kyrgyzstan. The range and depth of McCarry’s work are unique.

The plot, like many of McCarry’s, is straightforward: Paul Christopher, a fit 70, disappears while looking for his mother, Lori, who has been missing since World War Two. His nephew, Horace Hubbard, gathers together some of Paul’s old CIA colleagues and with Paul’s daughter, Zarah, starts looking for Paul.

The execution of the plot, however, is anything buy straightforward. To get to the Big Top, readers follow a midway filled with carnival rides and mazes, side-shows, and games of skill and chance. The story weaves in the murder of Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Nazi secret police, a theory that Jesus’s mission and crucifixion was part of a Roman covert-action operation, and cameos of various characters from other McCarry novels like the descendant of the Prophet Kalish al Khtar and the Berber Mata Hari, Lila Kahana.

Like Faulkner, McCarry has created a world in which almost all of his work takes place – even the books that are not part of the Christopher family saga. Characters from the Christopher saga appear in The Better Angels (1979), which deals with a charismatic Arab leader planning a 9-11 type attack, using passenger planes, on the United States, and Shelley’s Heart (1995), which deals with the mechanics of a stolen election. Both plots uncannily prescient.

There is also some crossover in Lucky Bastard (1999), a satiric account of a Bill Clinton-type Presidential candidate with a great sexual appetite, who is convinced he is the illegitimate son of JFK, and the candidate’s wife, who is a KGB operative. Despite the almost burlesque nature of the story, McCarry’s solid characters and detailed knowledge of how the worlds of espionage and political intrigue work make the stories plausible if not probable.

In The Bride of the Wilderness, McCarry has written an 18th century novel in the 20th century – a Defoe-esque romance that gives us the early history of the Christopher family. And the source of their instinct for espionage.

“They” – three of the 18th century French Saint-Christophe children, ancestors to the Christophers in McCarry’s six-book saga – “did not like Grestain” – one of the children’s suitors – “and told their parents so; their parents, called Sieur-et-Dame by their children, replied that they, the children, knew nothing about Grestain. [The game of] Spy was invented on the spot. The three children started collecting information on Grestain from servants, shopkeepers, etc. – and the family habit of espionage was established.

McCarry’s writing is spare. His rhythms echo the best of Hemingway, particularly Hemingway’s early short stories, which is suited to a field agent’s report, the hidden – and, as in The Miernik Dossier, some-times not so hidden model for McCarry’s style just as Hemingway’s was the journalist’s telegram.

Mostly I guessed at the route: in that terrain, which is a jumble of flinty hills and gravel fields, there is nowhere to go except through the passes. Occasionally, on a patch of soft ground, I’d find a tire track, and once a smear of oil where the Land Rover had apparently been parked while Qemal and Miernik and their friends ate lunch: there were pieces of food strewn over the ground, and behind a rock a pile of human excrement.

The scene is always sharply drawn, usually using all the senses, the sounds, smells, taste of copper in the air near a bloody death, revealing a consciousness – the espionage agent’s as much as the authors – which must be alert to survive.

The Miernik Dossier, the first of the Christopher series, is a late-20th century epistolary novel, made up of debriefings, field reports, and tape transcripts, concerning what may – or may not have been – a Russian-Polish operation in Sudan. Each puzzle piece offering a different point-of-view on the events, which hide more, the more they reveal – as if the closer one gets to the reality of an event, the harder it is to see the event whole. The accumulation of information hides the meaning of what happened the more it increases the felt sense of what is happening.

It’s in the nature of our work – Christopher writes in his final statement about the Miernik affair to the Outfit – that we never know how matters are going to turn out. We begin and end in the dark. There is an overlay of efficiency in everthing we do. I’m convinced that there is no more intelligent or unemotional group of men on earth than ourselves. That, if I may say so, is our principal weakness. Because our people are so bright, because our resources are so huge, we constantly tinker with reality.

A tinkering that never improves upon reality.

The subtlety of conscience – of a moral intelligence examining itself with the same objectivity an agent would analyze an asset or an antagonist – is the engine of McCarry’s books.

What we had at the beginning was a set of assumptions – Christopher continues. It was proper to test those assumption. After all, that is our job.
But the testing process – calling up our own resources and those of friendly services all over the world – creates an almost irresistible psychological force. We are experts in suspicion. We search diligently for evidence that will confirm our suspicions. To transform a supposition into a fact is the sweetest reward a desk man can know. We do it all the time, and usually we are right. But sometimes we are wrong, and I believe that there is no possible way for us to know this.

That self-reflective, scrupulous, cold, passionate desire to take apart reality – or what we can know of it – and see how it works, how the human mind or heart works, how fate or accident works on us is Jamesian in its ambition and Hawthornesque in its need to understand how the past presses on the present.

I think we ran Miernik as we did primarily for the fun of it. We have come to look on our work, in the field at least, largely as a sport.
Virtue for McCarry is on the other side of a knife blade from sin. The same clear-minded resolve to comprehend the world destroys us by becoming, in the act of comprehending the world, a lust to play with what we now so clearly understand. To play with it by rearranging it the way a kid on Christmas might, in trying to improve on a toy, destroy it. A mind so rid of the rubbish of preconceptions and emotions that it can see life plainly becomes a mind emptied of what makes seeing the world plainly desirable: Such a mind becomes a desolation.

Old Boys – really an afterthought to the Christopher saga – is the one book McCarry has written in which this questing intellect becomes gaudy. The plot and action set-pieces overwhelm the characters; and, while this makes the novel a compelling read, there is something as unnatural about it as a horse riding a man. We get where we’re going but at a cost. We finished the book satisfied, but unmoved.

If Old Boys lacks the McCarry Quality, the underlying knowledge that we pay for what we seek to understand, Tears of Autumn offers the most pure instance of McCarry’s gift. Originally proposed as a non-fiction analysis of the Kennedy Assassination, the book suggests a solution to the crime, which is knowledgeable, ingenious, and, once proposed, obvious. The search for truth in that book leads Christopher on a quest for answers that is its own reward: For obvious reasons, the Outfit – and the United States government – will not support Christopher’s investigation, so Christopher takes a leave of absence to follow the leads. On his own time. With his own money. When he satisfies himself that he knows what really happened and why, he offers the information to his superiors but is unmoved by their lack of interest in his discoveries. The Outfit and the Administration – like most governments – cannot afford the luxury of knowing, let alone acting, on the truth.

As an Administration official says, dismissing Christopher’s report, You’ve got to be careful who you let change history.
Christopher is content that he did his duty.

McCarry’s concerns – with honor, duty, and a mind unclouded by emotion – may have lost him the large audience his books should have gotten. Unlike the bitter agents in LeCarre – who see little difference between the hope of what America could, at its best offer the world, and the bone-yard of politics as usual – and, unlike the elegant agents spawned by James Bond, who search for sensation and find satisfaction in the death of their antagonists, McCarry’s heroes – and they are heroes – find only consolation in sensation and only horror in death, any death, even the death of their enemies.

Molly had taught [Christopher]…how to feel again, but not that it mattered, Tears of Autumn end. Molly moved under the featherbed and fitted her body against his, warm skin and hair that smelled of win and woodsmoke. Before Christopher went to sleep, he thought again, out of long habit, of the things he knew he could say and do to outwit the simplicity of her passion. But he gave up: his betrayals had not saved Luong or Cathy or any of the others. Lovers and agents, living within their secret, could not be saved, or even be warned, by treachery.

Molly murmured in her sleep and threw a nerveless arm across his chest. Christopher felt her pulse on his own skin.

Molly’s nerveless arm and Christopher, object rather than passionate, feeling her pulse on his skin ends the book emphasizing, once again, the examined life over the life of sensation. McCarry’s heroes watch and listen and calculate as if they were the Christopher ancestor in the 17th century Western Massachusetts wilderness alert for signals of animal life, food, or Mohawks, enemies. Survival depended on correctly reading those signals.

Lovers and agents – for McCarry they are the same and the tradecraft – like woodcraft – that can save your physical life must be used to save your emotional life. Living within their secret – all of us, whether we’re lovers and agents – can hope for no better than to live with their own secrets, because to betray your secrets is to make yourself vulnerable to some other who can then use your emotion, your passion, your commitment against you. Like Scobie at the party early in A Burnt Out Case [?], McCarry’s protagonists know that to love is to make yourself a hostage to fortune.

Because McCarry knows that there is little difference between lover and agents, between a life lived with the constant vigilance of those who can be betrayed by their heart or by an enemy operative – which, for McCarry, is a life lived as intensely as it can be lived – he writes better about women, men and women, and love than almost any other novelist.

McCarry’s characters have voices as unique as those in Dickens. His prose is as spare as Hemingway’s and Hammett’s. And his wit – or the wit he lends his creations – is mordant.

“The obsession with the invisible is the curse of mankind,” says one of McCarry’s presidential candidates.
Philippe…remembered what Bear [an Abenakis Indian describing his tribe’s customs] had said to him when they were fourteen: “If you see a girl that you like…you must go into her house at night, being sure that nobody sees or hears you, and lie on top of her. If she opens her eyes, that means go ahead. Sometimes they wait a long time, but in the end they always open their eyes. Women are very curious: they want to know who it is that’s lying on top of them.”

In one of his novels, an OSS operative under fire from the enemy doesn’t want to run but, convinced he’s about to be killed, tells his companion to mention Skull-and-Bones, which his companion does. As a good Bonesman, the operative must leave anyplace where an outsider mentions Bones, so the operative can, in good conscience, split.

McCarry has also written non-fiction – a biography about Ralph Nader and, as co-author, Alexander Haig’s memoirs, among other works. And has done some consulting for films.

For ten years, McCarry – who splits his year between Massachusetts and Florida – was a deep-cover agent in Africa, although he prefers to be considered a writer who did some spy work rather than a spy who wrote.

Of his time in the CIA, he once said, “I never met a stupid person in the agency. Or an assassin. Or a Republican… At least, on the operations side where I was, there were wall-to-wall knee-jerk liberals. And they were befuddled that the left outside the Agency regarded them as some sort of right-wing threat.”

McCarry’s writing is among the very best fiction – not spy fiction, but literary fiction – of the past twenty-five years. His exploration of how the past presses against the present puts him in the tradition of Hawthorne and James, as does his subtlety and vividness of character and of family drama.

McCarry’s books have been praised by Eric Ambler, George V. Higgins, Richard Condon, and Richard Helms, among others. He usually gets rave reviews – before his books drop from sight. The Ovelook Press is reprinting all of McCarry’s work, which will make the books more readily available for the audience that McCarry deserves.

For those of us who loved "The Last Supper" the first part of this book is like an old friend as it delves deep into the childhood of a great character. The second part is still good, but doesn't take us anywhere unexpected. I haven't come across a better story than the Christopher saga as told across four centuries and 7-8 books, and I'm sure existing fans will largely agree. If you're new to the series, start as I did with "The Last Supper" and you'll get to this eventually.

I like spy novels, but the first half moved slowly.

A great writer. Very accurate.

Normally, I cannot read "series" books as they are quite often a rehash of the same formula, written for lazy people who want to hear a familiar and unchallenging story. That is not the case with these books. For me , the stories are more than stories. They hold my interest and in them find knowledge and even enlightenment. Certainly, they are compelling and have a resonance for me personally. I am grateful for the obvious effort Mr. McCarry has put into them. I have the utmost respect for him.

Paraphrased from another of his books: "Is it possible that the things you doubt are actually exactly what they appear to be, rather than what you think they might be." I think it is more than possible.

A worthwhile read.
I have two comments.
- regarding the zodiac ride into Rügen, the author's use of the term speedometer lacks authenticity. Knotmeter would have been a better choice.
- also as one very familar with the history of NVG's & expereinced in their use, I question whether such devices (as described) were available in 1961.

If you've never read any of McCarry's Paul Christopher novels, you've missed a great and satisfying reading experience. If you have, this one will bring back the same kind of experience you had with the best ones of the lot.

I am an unabashed Paul Christopher fan. The first part is very good, an enfolding love story, albeit with a family that should have perhaps known better about the Nazis by 1939. The second part, set two decades is brilliant, a tremendous story of justice, retribution (and how they are different). Incredibly suspenseful, truly satisfying read for fans of suspense and spy fiction. Not necessarily McCarry's best but Paul Christopher is one of my favorite all-time characters.

FINE

Charles McCarry takes a page from the Alan Furst playbook, setting the first half of his novel in pre-war Berlin. He perfectly captures the pervasive fear and nervous conformity that must have dominated the city in those days. The characters are fully realized, there's a heartbreaking love story, a monstrous villian, a young man's quest for vengeance- this novel's got the goods. McCarry's real-world experience as an intelligence officer provides a bracingly realistic view of the spy game in the second half of the story.