Word: samsons
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...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 of a century...
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...
...this time every company west of the Mississippi will have merged into one giant corporation known as Samson Securities. Every company east of the Mississippi will have merged under an umbrella corporation known as the Delilah...
...Here is the gigantic face of Mussolini, carved out of East African rock, a modern sphinx without a secret. Here is Haile Selassie, dwarfed behind a desk only slightly smaller than an aircraft carrier. Here is Sir Sidney Barton, the eccentric British envoy who provided the model for Sir Samson Courteney in Evelyn Waugh's farce Black Mischief. Here are camels and trucks, scimitars and machine guns, lions and airplanes in a clash of politics and, more significantly, of centuries. It is a tribute to Mockler that he has managed to make this convoluted tale lucid and compelling. Still...