The Mulberry Bush by Charles McCarry

Published by Grove Atlantic/Mysterious Press on October 27, 2015

The early chapters of The Mulberry Bush are the story of an estranged father and son, told from the son’s perspective. The father was at one time a capable spy who angered (or embarrassed) the wrong people at Headquarters. When father and son reunite, the aftermath of their meeting gives the son a new purpose in life -- vengeance.

So begins the unnamed protagonist’s life as a spy, a career that he fashions on his own terms. Eventually he falls in love with Luz Aguilar, whose revolutionary/terrorist parents were killed by the police in Argentina. The protagonist believes that Luz can lead him to the Russians who control the Argentinians, but he also wants her help to pursue an agenda of his own.

The protagonist jets from Buenos Aires to Bogotá to Bucharest, playing the espionage game in his own way and aggravating his masters in the best tradition of spy fiction. Key characters include the protagonist’s stuffy superiors at Headquarters, a couple of Russians who may or may not want to betray their country’s secrets, a priest who once lived in Russia, and a surgeon who was close to Luz’ father and who is now Luz’ friend/protector. All of these characters have secrets that the protagonist must ferret out if he is to survive.

Many of the usual espionage plot threads are present in The Mulberry Bush. Are the apparent traitors really traitors or are they double agents? Are agents accused of being traitors because they really are or because the other side wants to destroy them with the weapon of suspicion? Is there a mole at Headquarters? Was Luz’ father working for the Russians, for Headquarters, or only for himself? The reader’s challenge is to work out what’s going on with the Russians, the Argentinians, and the Americans while getting a handle on just where the protagonist is headed.

Tension builds slowly and steadily as the story nears its climax. Charles McCarry isn’t a writer who needs to use artificial means (like the single-sentence paragraphs and two page chapters favored by many modern thriller writers) to move the story at a good pace. He writes vivid prose and creates complex, convincing, multifaceted characters. My only two complaints are that (1) the protagonist’s initial goal is clear but his plan for achieving it is ill-defined, leaving me wondering what he really hoped to achieve, and (2) the two Russians each disappear from the story in a way that left me unsatisfied. In the end, those qualms are minor. There was more than enough intrigue in The Mulberry Bush to ensure my rapt attention, and the plot twists kept me off-balance, as a spy novel should.

RECOMMENDED

The Shanghai Factor by Charles McCarry

Published by Mysterious Press on May 21, 2013

The Shanghai Factor is not Charles McCarry's best effort, but even a lesser McCarry novel is entertaining. This one is as much a mystery novel as a spy story, but it never quite develops the suspense and intrigue that fans of those genres crave.

A new agent, assigned as a sleeper in Shanghai, immediately breaks the rules by taking on a girlfriend he knows only as Mei. The unnamed agent assumes Mei is a spy but he likes the sex so he doesn't much care. Circumstances force the agent to leave China, but he soon returns with a new assignment: to set up Guoanbu operatives so they will be denounced as American spies. The operation appears to fizzle out, as does (to his great disappointment) his relationship with Mei. Back in New York, the encounters a Chinese operative who attempts to recruit him. Eventually it becomes difficult to know whether he can trust anyone, as each person who plays a significant role in his life might be a potential enemy, including the various women he beds at home and abroad. He becomes a pawn in a game played by two men "of mystery and power," one in Washington and one in China, all the while kept in the dark about the true nature of the game.

This is familiar ground for a spy novel, but the story is well told, often moving in unexpected directions. Most of it is credible, although some events near the novel's end seem both forced and implausible. McCarry maintains the novel's pace and the story is never dull. McCarry's observational talent is on full display, whether he's describing filth floating on the Yangtze or the curves of lover's body. His thoughts about the selective and uncertain nature of trust are not new to the genre, but they're well phrased. The same can be said of his observations about the power of coincidence and its relationship to fate.

For all its interest, however, the story is surprisingly light on suspense. The mystery's resolution is reasonably satisfying but not particularly surprising. The Shanghai Factor is the work of a supremely capable technician, but it lacks the "wow" factor that the best spy novels (and mysteries) produce. The agent is a well-defined character but not one I found myself caring much about. None of those complaints prevented me from enjoying the novel, but they prevent me from shelving it in the first tier of spy fiction.

RECOMMENDED

Ark by Charles McCarry

Published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Media on November 22, 2011

For reasons having to do with the faster rotation of the planet's core than its surface, the Earth will soon experience an apocalyptic event leading to "an interruption of civilization" -- or so predicts Henry Peel, a ultra-wealthy, reclusive genius who rarely errs in matters of science. His solution -- his plan for the salvation of the human race -- is to put a ship in orbit around the Earth before sending it on a thousand year voyage, carrying a few hundred humans and a particular cargo (the precise nature of which isn't revealed until a quarter of the novel has gone by). Henry's solution leads to an ethical debate about the degree to which man should play god, a common theme of science fiction.

For reasons that never seem persuasive, Henry recruits the novel's narrator, a female author, to act as his amanuensis. She faces a more personal threat than the coming apocalypse: a stalker who, having victimized her once, now intends to kill her. At a later point, she encounters (and beds) a somewhat more benign stalker. When she isn't being stalked, she follows Henry and doles out occasional dollops of advice.

I am a fan of Charles McCarry's spy novels. His craftsman-like storytelling ability shows in Ark: steady pace, fluid prose, sharply defined characters. He brings the elements of a thriller to this science fiction novel. In fact, the novel is better as a thriller than as sf. As a political thriller, Ark excels; McCarry's imagining of governmental responses to the private construction of a vast orbiting ark, of Henry's preemption of the less favorable responses, and of the media's coverage of it all, is intelligent and convincing.

As science fiction, however, Ark is acceptable but unexceptional. McCarry tosses out an occasional clever idea -- like using robotic hornets as a defensive weapon -- but the story itself isn't original: both the crisis and the solution are rehashes of concepts familiar to science fiction fans. Henry has visions -- they may be chemically induced or he may have a pipeline to God -- that seem out of place in a technology-driven story. To a large extent, the various concepts that McCarry cobbles together seem unfinished, never cohering into a focused whole.

Still, I enjoyed the story despite its flaws. Among those is McCarry's perpetuation of the myth that any time the police forget to read a suspect his rights the suspect automatically goes free -- a minor plot point that I nonetheless found grating. The suspect (one of the narrator's stalkers) turns into a significant character -- a serial rapist, no less -- whose contribution to the story is minimal despite its intended importance. A better subplot involves the narrator's mysterious lover, but his eventual disappearance from the story left me wondering why he was ever part of it. The larger plot leads to an ending that is in some respects anticlimactic but reasonably satisfying. On the whole, Ark isn't a bad attempt at science fiction, but the reading public will likely be better served if McCarry sticks to the spy novels that are his true forte.

RECOMMENDED

The Tears of Autumn by Charles McCarry

First published in 1975

To pursue his theory concerning the assassination of JFK, Paul Christopher resigns from the spy agency that employs him and with the tacit approval of his boss begins an investigation that takes him to Italy, France, and Vietnam, among other places. What he learns may seem a little far-fetched, but McCarry writes convincingly, and his story is a refreshing respite from the more conventional fictionalized views of the Kennedy assassination.

McCarry provides wonderful descriptions of the places to which Christopher travels; the reader can feel danger in the atmosphere as Christopher walks into a Vietnamese alley. McCarry deftly mixes politics with a stirring tale of investigatory intrigue to create a well-paced spy thriller that actually thrills.

I liked McCarry's first novel, The Miernik Dossier, slightly better, but this one is nearly as good.

RECOMMENDED

The Miernik Dossier by Charles McCarry

First published in 1973

Paul Christopher, a character in The Miernik Dossier who appears in most of Charles McCarry's subsequent espionage novels, writes in a report: "There is an artistry to what we are doing: spies are like novelists--except that spies use living people and real places to make their works of art." McCarry knows something about the similarities of spies and novelists, having been a CIA operative himself before commencing his career as a writer of spy novels. The Miernik Dossier is his first, and it is excellent.

The story is told in a series of documents: reports, transcripts of recorded conversations, cables, diary entries, and the like. A drawback of this format is the difficulty of developing a character's personality through documents. McCarry solved that problem by having Christopher (an American agent) write very thorough, engaging reports, complete with verbatim accounts of dialog, descriptions of clothing and scenery and body odors, discussions of his observations, fears, and thought processes, and other material that helps set the scene and flesh out the characters. (Amusingly, a document prepared by one of Christopher's handlers complains that Christopher's reports lack organization and are filled with extraneous information.) Perhaps real spies don't write entertaining reports that work well as chapters in a novel, but maybe McCarry did just that when he worked for the CIA. In any event, Christopher's reports (and to a lesser extent, his British counterpart's and Miernik's diary) provide the flavor that makes the novel work as well as it does.

And it does work well. The story is filled with intrigue as the American and British agents accompany a member of the Sudanese royal family and a Polish diplomat on a road trip from Geneva to Sudan. The two spies are operating under diplomatic cover; each knows that the other is an operative but neither can admit it. They suspect that the Pole is also a spy and that he may have something to do with a Soviet-run terrorist group that has recently formed in Sudan, but they're never quite sure what role the colorful, irascible Pole is playing: is he a spy, and if so, what is his mission in Sudan? Add to the mix the Pole's sister and the British spy's girlfriend, both of whom join the trip, and the story becomes almost comical as everyone suspects everyone else of being something other than what he or she seems. Of course, when things are not as they seem, there is a potential for mistaken actions, and in this novel, that risk leads to a powerful ending. Some fast-paced action scenes in the desert add additional excitement to a story that is never in danger of becoming dull.

The Miernik Dossier teaches a lesson that applies not just to intelligence agencies but to all law enforcement agencies: once an intelligence analyst (or, for that matter, a police detective) begins to theorize that someone is a spy (or a criminal), they are likely to look for evidence to support that theory and risk losing their objectivity. For its excellent illustration of that principle as well as its riveting story and sympathetic characters, I recommend this novel.

RECOMMENDED