Word: walls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...completely free of censorship and limitation. But my draft notice was not in the public discourse; it was a private communication, addressed to me and placed in my locked mailbox. For me, this makes the draft notice an issue about privacy. Had there been a poster on a wall, or a note slipped under my door, or a rally in my dining hall, I would have no argument. But when my privacy is involved, my position on the El Salvador issue becomes irrelevant. What if they had sent me a letter telling me that my mother had been killed...
...with the border Vopos tossing flowers and grinning like Father Christmas, the Berlin Wall has suddenly lost the cachet it once had for spy writers. For Le Carre the timing of the 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...
...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...
That sort of crudeness, recent events seem to be saying, is no longer imaginable. Thus agent Samson, with his perfect, idiomatic Berliner Deutsch and his deep knowledge of levels of murk and treachery on both sides of the Wall, is suddenly out of date. As are, an optimist dutifully believes, many thousands of border guards, KGB head beaters and assassins in the real world. Espionage will go on, of course, but presumably it will be of the corporate kind, waged among Japan, Korea and the European Community, which is apt to | include Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, what used to be called...
...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 do the job. A lot of fictional heroes with turned-up rain-coat collars must be worrying about their pensions...