Word: fiona
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...will remember, of course, that Bernard Samson, England's rough-cut intelligence agent in Berlin, was bamboozling communist Stasi operatives with great success until his beautiful and highborn wife Fiona defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less. This breach of marital etiquette caused Samson endless problems -- how to find a suitable nanny for the children, whether to marry his young mistress, how to prove that he himself was not a Soviet mole, and so on -- detailed moodily and lengthily in the two most recent novels of Deighton's double trilogy, Spy Hook...
This final entry gives Fiona's side of matters. As Bernard had pretty much figured out by the end of Spy Line -- and as the KGB was surely on the point of discovering -- Fiona had been a double agent all along, playing a delicate and deadly game for the cozy old establishmentarians who run Britain's spies. Deighton persuades the reader to take this shell-and-pea shuffling more or less seriously by giving real weight to Fiona's predicament. She is bright and tough, but the pressure of remembering her lines and her lies has worn away her resilience...
...Freddie, "a poet of the '50s in the sense that his career was almost totally confined to the years 1958-59," has been sexually recharged by modern medicine. Son Piers is a wastrel and dodgy lodger at his father's house. Ex-stepdaughter Bunty is a lesbian, and niece ) Fiona an alcoholic...
This is parody, of course, and not just of recent, mole-infested history, but of that other cold war, the one between divorced ex-husbands and their former wives. One of Samson's deep fears has been that Fiona would get custody of their two teenage children and spirit them off to the G.D.R. Fiona surfaces with a flourish in the current novel, her fans will be glad to learn, leaving two important issues unresolved. One is whether she was a real defector or, possibly, a truly extraordinary double agent. The other is how long Gloria, Samson's newly acquired...
...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 politics, whole-wheat pasta and the melting of the polar ice caps are all alarming, but they don't quite...