Word: deightons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...LINE by Len Deighton (Knopf; $18.95). When the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, it landed on Deighton, who was caught in mid-trilogy about a British agent in the divided city whose wife has left him to set up her own spy shop on the east side of the Wall. A competent thriller that seems just a little quaint...
...Wall's decline as a cold war symbol is only slightly awkward. His latest novel, The Russia House, fails, unsurprisingly, to anticipate the collapse of the East bloc, but it does deal credibly with the slipperiness of glasnost and the refusal of U.S. hard-liners to embrace perestroika. Deighton, on the other hand, is caught embarrassingly short. Spy Line, his new novel, puts him five books into a convoluted six- volume series that depends on East Germany's walled-in villainy to sustain its gray and sunless menace...
...narrative's first volume, Berlin Game, began with heavy irony, as Deighton's hero Bernard Samson, a British agent watching for trouble at the Wall, asked his friend Werner Volkmann, "How long have we been sitting here?" and Volkmann answered sourly, "Nearly a quarter of a century." Spy Line, set in the present, starts off with a joke that might have been heard over coffee at a Tory think tank: "Glasnost is trying to escape over the Wall, and getting shot with a silenced machine gun!" Its pivotal violence is a bloody shoot-out during an attempted escape along...
Luckily for Deighton, there is no sign of change in his narrative's other engine of mischief, the mole-ridden, class-clotted English intelligence apparatus. A considerable part of the fun of the author's nearly endless chronicle has always been his seething contempt, and Samson's, for England's upper-class bumblers, and for Oxbridge leftists of the Kim Philby stamp. Readers who have followed Samson from Berlin Game will recall that his very upper-class wife Fiona, also an English intelligence agent, defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less...
...this has bubbled cheerfully in the two novels that followed Berlin Game in Deighton's first Samson trilogy, Mexico Set and London Match, and then in Spy Hook, the beginning of a second trilogy, which has Samson under suspicion and on the run from his own colleagues. The current Spy Line sags just a bit, but it will lead, readers are assured, to resolution in a promised final thriller, Spy Sinker. Will Fiona and Samson retire to a cottage in Cornwall and argue over lunch? More important, will Deighton or anyone else find a menace to replace the Wall? Lite...