Word: milson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...answer provided by Author Piers Paul Read, 40, sticks faithfully to the thriller formula: make a stroke of luck seem plausible and clever. Just when the officials need him most, up pops Simon Milson. He not only works for the Foreign Office, but he knew Ludley at school years earlier. Best of all, he has just received an unexpected invitation from Ludley's wife to visit them at their home, the Villa Golitsyn in Nice. After being briefed by a grateful supervisor, Milson eagerly sets out to trick his host into a confession...
After all this winding, the plot should tick toward the hour of denouement. Instead, The Villa Golitsyn keeps exploding. Its cloak-and-dagger trappings mask a quest that is much more serious and dangerous than the entrapment of a possible spy. Before his mission is completed, Milson is forced to test his own flexible, contemporary morals in a series of severe challenges. He becomes, however unwillingly, a student of Christian theology and then its potential victim. Near the end, he must save either himself or his conscience...
These puzzles ultimately resolve themselves into a morality play, with principle pitted against expediency. This deep struggle is just as engaging as the cat-and-mouse game between Milson and Ludley. Readers may choose to ignore the metaphysics and allow suspense alone to drive them forward through the book. The Villa Golitsyn can be read once for fun and a second time for enlightenment. Read's seven earlier novels received critical praise but not the commercial popularity of Alive (1974), his nonfiction account of a plane crash in the Andes and the ordeal of its survivors. This book...
Read never allows Milson's ordeal to stray into abstractions. His characters talk about history and ethics, but they enact them as well. Questions blossom from events. Why is Ludley methodically drinking himself to death? Why does his wife want him to sleep with Helen, a runaway English schoolgirl who has fetched up at the villa? And why is Ludley, who once spouted Nietzsche and spurned conventional behavior, resisting...
...governor will be in charge of all administrative affairs within the occupied territories and will have both Israeli and Arab civilians working under him. The armed forces will be responsible for security in the territories; civilians will take over all other tasks. The new governor will be Menachem Milson, a native-born Israeli who is a distinguished Arabist, a professor of Arabic literature at Hebrew University and a former adviser to the military government...