This the third and final novel in the Len Deighton’s second trilogy of books about 40-something British intelligence officer Bernard Samson.
In the first trilogy (Berlin Game, Mexico Set, London Match) his gorgeous, clever wife Fiona was exposed as a high-level ‘mole’ in the Department and forced to flee in a hurry to East Berlin.
In the first two novels of this set Bernard began to suspect – and then had it abundantly confirmed – that Fiona was in fact a double agent and had been working for us all along.
But the rainswept night of her final escape back from East Berlin to our side turned into a bloodbath: Samson and Fiona manage to escape but the agent accompanying Bernard – and Fiona’s sister, Tessa – are shot dead, as are the East German agent Stinnes and another man, Harry Kennedy.
The ex-CIA hitman masterminding this carnage burns Tessa’s body in the car, and throws the British agent, Stinnes and Harry into a deep ditch – part of the roadworks where the whole shambles took place – and where they will be covered with concrete and never found… Leaving the reader in shock.
What next?
Up until this bloody shootout the main appeal for me of the Samson stories was the generally light, mocking tone of the first person narrative and the relaxed, almost sitcom, feel to Samson’s generally humdrum round of work, meetings, files and reports, and his similarly mundane domestic life, hanging with his kids, with the girlfriend Gloria he took up with after his wife defected, and the numerous drinks parties and dinner parties where we meet and remeet the cast of recurring characters who populate the novels in an almost Dickensian teeming.
I found this social scene far more convincing and solidly imagined than the often far-fetched and abruptly violent elements of the ‘spy stories’. Especially as the spy stories boil down to such a simple narrative arc:
- Fiona defects (Berlin Game)
- Interlude while a KGB officer we thought was defecting, Erich Stinnes, turned out to be a spy so we sent him back (Mexico Set, London Match)
- But Fiona isn’t a traitor after all, but a triple agent (Spy Hook, Spy Line).
In the last few pages of Spy Line we see Bernard and Fiona flown to Bret Rensselaer’s luxury safe house in California for Fiona to be debriefed at length. The Department has accounted for Fiona’s disappearance by making it look as if she died in the car conflagration (though I still don’t understand why the opposition are going to believe the car burst into flames; specially since it was a night of heavy rain).
But she saw her sister murdered in front of her and realises that was done to protect her. How can she avoid having a massive nervous breakdown? How can she ever go back to her ‘normal’ life? And the Department has put word out that Bernard has run off with Tessa, to explain their joint disappearance. How can that ever let Bernard return to London, where his mere presence will expose the falsehood? I really like the character of George Kosinski, the rough-and-ready East End used car salesman Tessa was married to. He will be devastated Tessa has run off with Bernard.
How can any of these people return to their happy-go-lucky lives or the novels return to their amiable, chatty tone?
Third-person narrator
Deighton deftly sidesteps all the problems he had created for himself with the biggest surprise of the series so far – by switching narrative voice to a third person narrator, and by leaving our heroes’ present dilemma altogether to travel back in time and recap the entire narrative of the previous five novels from other people’s points of view! It is a bold and sometimes bewildering move because the net effect is to undermine and question everything we thought we knew.
So Spy Sinker commences back in September 1977, before the start of the first novel – Berlin Game – with the story of Fiona’s recruitment and the hatching of the plan to make her a double agent, showing the earliest genesis of the plan in conversations between Bret Rensselaer – whose idea it is – and the Director General, Sir Henry Clevemore – who is persuaded to sanction it. Both know she’s married to Samson and both agree to keep Samson completely in the dark whatever happens.
Thus we realise almost everything Samson tells us in the first person narratives of the previous five books has been flawed, half-informed, and often completely wrong. We, the reader, have been ‘had’ just as much as Samson.
Seeing Samson’s world from the outside, and having events we’ve seen through his eyes retold by an omniscient narrator, is a revelation – or a series of revelations. The dominant effect is to show how thoroughly deceived and lied to he’s been by absolutely everyone: by his wife, his colleague Bret Rensselaer, his old friend Silas Gaunt and by the Director General of the Department – they were all in on the deception and kept it from him for five years.
At the end, and particularly bitterly, even his closest and oldest friend Werner Volkmann is let in on the secret and keeps it from him.
Same scenes, drastically different perspectives
Incident after incident from the earlier novels is retold showing us what really happened. To give a small selection:
- When he was hijacked by a black nurse in Mexico Set in order to pick up Fiona, it turns out it wasn’t Fiona but an agent impersonating her in an operation set up by Moscow thug Moskvar. He wanted to provoke Samson into pursuing the black agent back to the Department safe house in Bosham, where they would capture, torture and then murder him. Samson, as intended (and as he tells us) believes the impersonator is his wife (improbably) but then sends a junior operative to track down the black woman, and it is he who is tortured and murdered. The failure of his plan badly damaging Moskvar’s reputation back in the East.
- The whole plotline which dominated the end of Spy Hook – the Department’s growing suspicion that Bret Rensselaer is a double agent – created and fostered by the two-timing KGB defector Erich Stinnes — we see this from the East Berlin point of view, how the KGB plan it and plant suspicion of Bret via his handling of the Stinnes defection. Which eventually leads to a commission of enquiry in which Stinnes bluntly incriminates Bret. Their case is helped by the fiasco in the laundrette in Hampstead where Bret had insisted on being in the field with Samson when the KGB men turning up to collect some money turn nasty with shotguns: Bernard is forced to shoot them both. [As so often with outbreaks of violence in Deighton, despite having read two different accounts of it, I still don’t understand why Bret and Samson were waiting with money to pay KGB agents and have no idea why the latter started the violence.] But this and other incidents are all a backdrop to Bret suddenly fleeing in a panic to Berlin which is the point, in Spy Hook, where we saw him – from Bernard’s point of view – abruptly turning up on the latter’s doorstep.
- At the end of London Match there is a prolonged shootout in the streets of Berlin following the hostage exchange of Samson’s friend Werner Volkmann for the ‘defector’ Stinnes, in which the brutal Moskvin is forced to flee through the streets, exchanging gunfire with the following agents until shot by his own side, not before shooting and badly wounding Bret. (As with the laundrette scene, I still don’t really understand why his own side wanted to kill Moskvin, even after two explanations, in London Match and here. Like the other bursts of violence, it seems illogical, unnecessary and amateurishly done.)
- Bret, severely wounded in Berlin, is flown to the luxury ranch in California which – we now learn from this book – he uses as a base to continue receiving information from Fiona, cleanse it and pass it onto the CIA.
- To my astonishment, Fiona recruits Werner Volkmann, just before his exchange the exchange back to the West, to become a direct conduit between her and the DG Sir Henry. a) It seems immensely risky to hire a non-employee of the Department for such an incriminating role b) so Werner is let in on the secret that Fiona is a double agent and keeps it from his best friend, Bernard, for the next 4 years!
- At various points we watch old Silas Gaunt and the DG of the Department callously making plans which toy with other peoples’ lives and it is upsetting the way they tinker with telling Samson Fiona still loves him and is loyal to her country and him, before deciding not to, and leaving his life in ruins. Possibly all this is permissible for the importance of the mission they’ve given her. But they cross a line when, towards the end, we watch them orchestrating Fiona’s escape back to the West and deliberately acquiescing in murder.
- It is Silas who hires an ex-CIA hitman, Thurkettle (who Samson had run across in Spy Line) and makes him the murdering orchestrator of the bloodbath. In a manouevre which I didn’t understand it is arranged for Fiona to be at the rendezvous at the motorway works with Erich Stinnes – now, very implausibly, caught up in drug smuggling.
- Thurkettle will arrange the meeting for the now-drug-running Stinnes to hand over a consignment of heroin. But I have no idea why Fiona, Stinnes’ boss, would be with him on what sounds like a criminal act. I have no idea why Fiona couldn’t just get in a car and drive down the Autobahn into West Germany then be spirited away. The reason given is that, if the KGB think she is dead, they will leave their security setups as they are, allowing us to exploit Fiona’s inside information for a while longer; if they knew she’d defected back they’d change all their arrangements. But is this intelligence really worth the murder of Fiona’s sister, Tessa – which is what it leads to? For Thurkettle goes to great lengths to arrange for a body like Fiona’s to be found burned to a crisp in a burned out car, and whose body will that be – her sister’s.
- And I still don’t understand what the KGB are to meant to make of all this: why was the car ever meant to have caught fire? It’s parked stationary off the motorway so it’s not in a crash. Is this the best British Intelligence can come up with?
- A ghoulish element is introduced because Tessa’s head must be sawn off so that her skull can be replaced with another skull with Fiona’s dental work to persuade the KGB it really is her. But won’t their forensic scientists notice that this corpse has had its head sawed off? Might they wonder why the corpse of their former East Berlin chief is found with its head cut off in a car parked by the side of a motorway which has burst into flames for no good reason?
- It just seems like a rubbish plan, too random, contrived and unnecessarily complicated
- I just don’t believe the two old Etonians, Silas and Sir Henry, can calmly sit drinking whisky and smoking cigars in their nice country house and planning the murder of an innocent woman, one they’ve met socially several times. I don’t believe it.
Another big shocker in the first half of the book is the discovery that, for some time before she defected, Fiona was having an affair with a Canadian psychiatrist, a sustained sexual infidelity to her husband. This completely changes the framework of the preceding five novels. Fiona’s betrayal of Samson is even more personal than we’d thought. He’s called Harry Kennedy and, like all Deighton characters who do so, he falls almost immediately into a trance-like and perfect epitome of ‘love’: ‘I love you darling.’ ‘I know, darling.’
[All Deighton characters fall in love the same way and then talk in the same lovey-dovey way: Fiona and Harry’s love talk sounds just like Bernard and Gloria’s and just like Jamie Farebrother and Victoria’s in Goodbye, Mickey Mouse.]
In a further revelation, towards the end of the novel Fiona, the DG and Bret back in London (and we the reader) discover that her Canadian lover in fact comes from a Ukrainian family, was a member of the Communist Party at university and has done bits of small work for the KGB in the past – a discovery which stuns and amazes Fiona, leaving her feeling even more paranoid and lonely in her isolated double role in the terrifying East. Was Harry set to spy on her? Is he a glorified minder? Yes. Is there anyone she can trust? No.
Lowering
The net effect is, I think, depressing. Samson who in the first five books is the virile, confident and amusing narrator – is now revealed as entirely fallible, misled about everything. This applies not only in his immediate life but the book also refers to the events at the end of World War Two in which his father’s career in the SIS was tarnished, and shows how unfair that accusation was (specifically, the killing of the two Winter brothers which concludes Deighton’s epic novel, Winter, which provides historical background to the Samson books). Thus Deighton makes the trail of doubt and deceit goes back indefinitely into the past…
Depressing because Samson is partly a symbol of all of us. Fictions, novels, give us the entirely spurious impression we understand what is going on in the world. Fictional characters’ lives are laid out in generally schematic ways, as they interact with a small and manageable number of people in sequences of events known as ‘plots’ which have a convenient beginning, middle and end.
That’s why the first five Samson novels are so reassuring and warm (despite the occasional outbursts of violence each one contains). The amused tone of the ever-confident Samson is buoyant, reassuring company. But this sixth novel systematically devastates our understanding of what went before, making us realise we’ve understood almost nothing. And along with the events it undermines, go the warmth and security the other books had created. This book destroys those feelings. We are alone on a darkling plain.
Skipping
Deighton speeds up the overview in the last 100 pages. An author who normally takes ten pages to describe two people chatting over a drink or in a bedroom or on a country walk, suddenly skips big sections of time. As when he begins to show us the investigation committee set up to review Bret’s management of Stinnes’ defection in great detail, showing the members arriving at the safe house in the country where Stinnes is being kept, describing each of the men sitting round the table, and beginning with verbatim accounts of what is being said, as if this scene alone will, characteristically, take another ten pages… But then – it is almost as if Deighton is bored with his own thoroughness – the text suddenly reverts to a high-level summary:
When Bret faced the wall of opposition which Moskvin and Stinnes had between them constructed brick by brick, he did something that neither of the Russians had provided for. Rensselaer went to Berlin and pleaded for the aid of Bernard Samson. (p.321)
In the last 100 pages there are several occasions when the narrative tires of its own detail and simply jumps mid-paragraph to a completely new scene. Some sections repeat or introduce characters we already know. Overall the text gives the impression of having been written at different times – maybe the objective scenes were written at the same time that Samson’s point of view was being written for the earlier novels – and not fully integrated into a seamless whole.
It is very bitty, jumping between the key scenes of the earlier novels, relying on our memory of them to give the narrative coherence.
Undermining the East German economy
In the scene early in the novel, set in 1978, when Bret suggests his plan of creating a triple agent to fool the East Germans – a plan they eventually name Operation Sinker, hence the title of the novel and, by extension, of all three novels in the sequence – it is explained how Fiona’s infiltration is designed to undermine the East German state in two ways:
- to identify key engineers, scientists and intellectuals who can be enticed to the West creating a ‘brain drain’
- to identify opposition groups, dissidents from left or right, church and human rights organisations and so on, which the West can tacitly support and thus undermine the communist regime
The DG and Bret are seen speculating wildly that if the operation succeeds, they’ll have the Berlin Wall crashing down in ten years time, by, ooh, say, 1990.
Now, as we all know, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe did crumble in the second half of 1989 and the Wall was knocked through in November of that year (even if it didn’t begin to be formally demolished till June 1990). This novel was published in 1990 by which time not only was the Wall down, but we knew how it came about – the final collapse of the Soviet model of the Command Economy under Gorbachev whose efforts at selective loosening of the reins of state control (perestroika) only hastened its decay, along with the rapid growth of civic groups opposing the regime (given more freedom of expression under glasnost) – including dissidents and especially groups based in churches. Then the final straw of Hungary’s decision to open its borders and allow free passage for any East European citizen to the West, which at a stroke made the Wall redundant.
I would dearly love to know whether Deighton had conceived Fiona’s mission in terms which so closely predicted the actual course of events right from the start and before the first novel in the series was published in 1983 when everyone thought Soviet domination, the Wall and all the rest of it would last indefinitely? Or was the alignment to historical fact, and the timescale, only introduced after all this came to pass? Was Len a prophet predicting the future – or a dab hand at cutting and pasting actual events into a long-pondered narrative?
Books & Boots 