Word: samsons
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...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...
Partly because he worked from sketches, engravings or memories of sculpture, Reni's heroic male nudes -- the Samson Victorious, and the various figures of Hercules done for the Gonzaga in Mantua -- have a sculptural intensity that blots out the rest of the painting. Background figures scurry about in deep recession, half transparent, like wraiths out of Tintoretto; the landscape is simplified into broad plains; against this, the single magnified body rises up. One remembers only the imposing structure turning, as it were, before the eye, displaying its stresses and bulges -- straining for embodiment and yet defeating it with...
Instead of a pension, however, Samson now gets a whole new Deighton trilogy, beginning with Spy Hook. Line and Sinker are the titles of the projected other novels, suggesting an activity more passive and a lot murkier than tennis. In this new work, Deighton's temptingly baited plot lines run dark and deep. The first half offers more nibbles than bites as Samson discovers just how little his bosses want him to know about their intelligence operations...
...Samson seems slow to catch on to the freeze-out, it is partly because he has been distracted by Fiona's replacement. Lovely Gloria also works at Secret Service (London Central), and is more than 20 years younger than Deighton's middle-aged hero. As in previous Deighton thrillers, the pace quickens once the cool atmospheres and the cast of characters are established. Curious Bernie learns he is being used, but the stronger his suspicions, the more forceful are his bosses' warnings to lay off. At one point, he is ordered across the Atlantic and the American continent...
...inconclusive story of vanished Secret Service funds, estimated at (pounds)4 million, that are thought to have been used by Fiona to set up an intelligence network in East Germany. But one can never be sure. Deighton dangles quite a few possibilities that should lure readers on to future Samson adventures. In addition to dead men who do not stay dead, there may be a defector who may not be defective: a small hint is dropped that Fiona could be working for our side after all. When last seen, Bernie is on the run from his own people. Obviously...