The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene

To walk from Paddington to Battersea gives time for thought. He knew what he had to do long before he climbed the stairs. A phrase of Johns's came back to mind about a Ministry of Fear. He felt now that he had joined its permanent staff. But it wasn't the small Ministry to which Johns had referred, with limited aims like winning a war or changing a constitution. It was a Ministry as large as life to which all who loved belonged. If one loved one feared. That was something Digby had forgotten, full of hope among the flowers and the Tatlers.

It's a classic noir set-up, the wrong man: Arthur Rowe has his fortune read at a local festival. The fortune teller, one member of a spy network working in service of the Axis, tells him the winning number for a guess-the-weight game, and he goes home with the prize cake. But inside the cake somewhere is a bit of microfilm for which England's enemies are willing to intimidate, even kill. A German raid saves Arthur from his pursuers, but they're dogged: first, they try to pin a murder on him, then they try to explode him. Neither of these works, but the bomb gives him a spell of amnesia, and Arthur finds himself committed to a sinister mental ward, under a false name he doesn't know is not his.

It's a shaggy dog story, all right. On top of all this, Arthur carries around with him a horrible guilt: he really is a murderer. Years before, Arthur poisoned his ailing wife in an act of mercy. It's this act, actually, that makes Arthur difficult to blackmail or chase underground. Having done the most horrible thing he can imagine, Arthur has little to lose, and no conception of himself as either too good or too vulnerable. At the same time, Arthur's deed lies in contrast to the murders and machinations of the spy network that make up the title "Ministry of Fear." "You think you are so bad," an Austrian refugee named Anna tells him--not exactly a femme fatale, but a recognizable noir figure just the same--"But they can bear pain--other people's pain--endlessly. They are the people who don't care."

The amnesia thing is very silly. Perhaps in 1943, when Greene wrote the novel, it seemed a little less hoary. But it works here because, while Arthur slowly regains his memories, the memory of his wife's murder is the one thing he fails to recover. By forgetting the deed, he is renewed, equally determined as before, but with a fresh and much-needed conscience. The "new" Arthur is no murderer, but an avenger.

The Ministry of Fear actually struck me as one of the stronger of Greene's espionage books. It's more complex, less tawdry, than This Gun for Hire, more interesting that Stamboul Train, two of the books packaged with it in my four-book omnibus. The fourth, Our Man in Havana, illustrates how Greene's later books, even as they kept their spy themes, moved outward into the "Greeneland" of MI6; but The Ministry of Fear alone captures something worthwhile about the homefront. The constant air raids of the Blitz are a physical analog of the "Ministry of Fear," who look like ordinary doctors and tailors but who whose mission, whether by coercion or bribery, is to batter at the integrity of British domestic life. One way to read Arthur is as a symbol for the United Kingdom: no innocent, but one whose crimes cannot compare to the true evil that wages war against him.

The Geneva Option by Adam Lebor

Yael Azoulay is a fixer for the UN Secretary General. She is not the kind of fixer whose primary tool is a gun. She relies on her wits, her intuition, and her ability to negotiate with anyone, whether warlords, genocidal dictators, and unscrupulous businessmen. When she is sent to the eastern Congo to negotiate with a Hutu warlord, something goes wrong, and she realizes that she's in serious danger, a danger with roots that snake there way back to the United Nations Headquarters.

Lebor writes action as well as just about any author I have read, and he sets scene quickly and vividly, sometimes with little more than a sentence or a phrase. One such sentence read, "Yael was drenched in seconds as the wet gusts hit her." This came in the middle of a fist-and-foot-fight between Yael and her captor in a car, shortly after the passenger-side windows shattered. At its core, the sentence is pretty basic, but it provides readers with a vivid setting for this scene in a mere eleven words. Brevity is hard to do.

Lebor includes a near perfect amount of detail in his writing, enough to immerse readers in a city, in a culture, or in an ornate 19th century building, but still well short of the overly-detailed writing of authors like Tom Clancy.

Although the preponderance of characters in The Geneva Option are fictitious, Lebor lends some verisimilitude to his international thriller, by referencing real-life events, situations, and in some instances even political figures. This, no doubt, stems from Lebor's investigative journalism background.

Although I really enjoyed The Geneva Option, I have one slight caveat. While I liked Lebor's Yael Azoulay character, there were a number of instances where it was obvious that this strong female lead was the creation of a male mind.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré

"What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives."

I hesitate to call The Spy Who Came in from the Cold a spy novel, because I think that phrase brings with it certain modern connotations. This book is an espionage novel.

The events in the book occur in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the Cold War. The British Secret Intelligence Service asks Alec Leamas to pretend to defect to East Germany and then feed them misinformation that would lead them to believe that one of their men was a British double agent. This is the crux of the story. To make Leamas seem prime for defection, he is unceremoniously sacked and provided with only a meager pension. Leamas is given a job at a small library, from which is promptly gets fired.

By the time the East German Communists decide to come calling on Leamas, he has drunk himself into a hole. What Leamas and British Intelligence did not count on was that someone else would also coming calling on him. Liz Gold, a woman that he met while working at the library is concerned for Leamas, and comes to find him and make sure he is alright. It is unclear to the reader how much Leamas is still in control of his life at this point and--at least initially--if he has actual feelings for Gold. Perhaps Leamas wasn't sure himself. Needless to say, Gold's involvement with Leamas complicates everything.

I cannot think of a a novel with an ending that was more taut than The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The Mission Song by John le Carré

I wasn't going to count this book because I didn't actually read it. I listened to part of it while driving home from New Orleans, and the rest while driving home from Atlanta. But Brent made a convincing argument for my counting it.

I must confess that the name John le Carré meant nothing to me prior to this book. I have since been informed that he was written quite a few well-known spy novels, such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The Constant Gardener, The Tailor of Panama, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.

The Mission Song is told in first person past tense, by Bruno Salvo, a top-class interpreter who works for the British Secret Service. Born in the Congo, he now resides in London and is married -- although not happily -- to a prominent tabloid journalist. As the son of an Irish Catholic priest and a Congolese woman, Salvo is somewhat of an outcast. He knows many Congolese languages, as well as French and Enlgish., making him a valuable asset to the secret service.

The story that Salvo recounts is one of political machinations. An unknown entity -- it is hinted that it is some American corporation -- has arranged talks between the various ethnic groups within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the stated purpose of brokering peace that would be economically beneficial to all involved parties. But as the summit progresses, Salvo begins to suspect that instead of peace, the goal is really to spark a civil war in the Congo. He realizes that he must do what he can to stop this from happening.

I don't particularly like audiobooks. I think the medium only works well in a small number of cases. Books of essays, such as the works of David Sedaris or Sarah Vowell, work well. Memoirs too. However, the novels that I have listened to have lost something in the translation. John le Carré is a good writer, but I found it harder to appreciate his writing when it was read to me. I plan on actually reading one of his other books.