Best espionage books5/17/2023 And Martin Odum spends the entirety of Legends (2006) grappling with his many identities, stripped away to reveal the hole at the center of his existence, as what must exist for far too many spies, current and former.Įspionage is the scaffolding for nearly all of Littell’s books. The Sisters (1986), my personal favorite of Littell’s novels, is a joyous romp of intelligence hijinks by two ruthlessly intelligent case officers, until the reason for their clever goings-on – a presidential assassination – dawns with mounting dread. Charlie Heller, spurred by the terrorism death of his fiancée to plot revenge against her killers in The Amateur (1981), uses his top-secret cryptography skills to blackmail the agency into letting him run wild, even as they fully intend to exact opposite. AJ Lewinter is structured like a chess match. Littell’s characters are always aware of being pawns. The expatriate remove almost certainly allows for distance from his home country, but it also allows for clarity, as in this essay on the erosion of national security under the outgoing administration. (His time in Bulgaria led to the 1976 novel The October Circle.) He quit the magazine to write full time and then moved to Paris with his family in the early 1970s, where he has lived ever since. Littell acquired his espionage acumen as a foreign correspondent for Newsweek in the 1960s, reporting from behind the Iron Curtain on multiple occasions. ![]() But it is also stark truth that cuts deeper almost two decades later: too many people still view geopolitics as sport, the consequences (mass death, propping up tyrants, terrorism, hunger, you name it) barely registering as important. ![]() It is meant as sarcasm, because the 900-page epic documents the on-the-ground, multi-generational, transatlantic horror resulting from the United States and Soviet Union’s bipartisan addiction to spying. “The Cold War may be over but the great game goes on,” quips a CIA spy to his mentor at the end of Robert Littell’s 2002 masterwork The Company. Where John Le Carre channeled barely suppressed rage into realist narratives steeped in bureaucracy, and Charles McCarry took the adage that “the average intelligence officer is a sort of latter-day Marcel Proust,” Littell is more ironic and mordantly funny than his spy-writing peers, poking an eye at American patriotism while mercilessly skewering Soviet cynicism. ![]() I had the sense that Littell’s particular style of spy novel would speak to me when American democracy seemed, and still remains, gravely under threat. Lewinter (1973) through to his newest, Comrade Koba, published in November. They number more than 20 novels, from The Defection of A.J. Two months before the election, I decided to read through the complete works of Robert Littell.
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