Word: berlin
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...pretty good spy thriller can be spotted now and then, ducking around a corner or disappearing into a manhole, as Len Deighton slowly brings his three-volume tale of find-the-mole to a close. Readers who have stayed with the author from the beginning may have forgotten that Berlin Game, the first book in the trilogy, begins with British Intelligence Agent Bernard Samson and his old friend Werner Volkmann doing a bit of surveillance near the Berlin Wall. Samson, sour and middle-aged, asks, "How long have we been sitting here?" and Volkmann, an ironist, replies, "Nearly a quarter...
Just so. Still, there have been moments worth the thousand-and-some pages of skulk and murk. Berlin Game should have been dedicated to divorced men everywhere, because in it Samson's supercilious, upper-class wife Fiona not only defects to the Soviets, but is revealed to be a KGB colonel. Samson and the dreaded Fiona skirmish at a distance in Mexico Set, the second book. At the end he appears to be ahead in this contest that seems a parody of postmarital discord, as he takes in hand Stinnes, a high-ranking Soviet defector...
London Match brings Samson, the weather-beaten fieldman, back from Mexico City and Berlin to fester among intelligence bureaucrats in England. Stinnes must be debriefed if he is not a plant and foiled if he is. Samson, under suspicion because of Fiona's bad behavior, gets the assignment. He is impeded not so much by Stinnes and his ex-wife, though she is threatening to grab their children, as by his superiors. These careerists are, variously, twits, fops, climbers and pooh-bahs whose entire interest is in position, perks and, after they have dithered and muddled for a sufficient number...
...measure of Deighton's considerable skill is that despite Samson's chronic grousing, anyone who starts Berlin Game is likely to persist through to the end of London Match. The story could have been brilliant if some ferocious editor had slashed it ruthlessly to one taut volume. Even so, the texture is wonderfully gray and grainy, and the scenes between Volkmann and Samson in the first and third novels are authoritative. Samson's predicament is a metaphor of middle age, if anyone should need one. And in the days of constant spy revelations, the central questions continue to haunt...
...major luncher: "I had lunch with Eliot a few days ago at the club ... On Thursday went to the luncheon given in honour of John Lehmann at the Trocadero ... Lunch in Paris with Denis de Rougemont ... We gave a luncheon for Auden and the Austrian Ambassador ... In Berlin, at luncheon, I met George Kennan again ... Went to lunch with Robert Oppenheimer ... [Guy Burgess] invited me to lunch at his apartment ... Lunched with Cyril (Connolly) at Whites ... Pauline de Rothschild rang and I lunched with her and Philippe at Prunier." There are also dinners with Igor Stravinsky and Edith Sit-well...