4The Daily Tar Heel Thursday, August 21, 1986
Spies and sportswritfers smbjects for recent novels
By JAMES SUROWIECKI
Assistant Sports Editor
John le Carre: A Perfect Spy"
John le Carre is the definitive spy
novelist of the past 25 years. In
works like "The Spy Who Came
In from the Cold" and "Tinker.
Tailor. Soldier. Spy." he has
created a world of shadow, where
very little is what it seems and
where the only constants are
duplicity and the venerable English
agent George Smiley, le Carre's
most compelling character. In his
new novel. the semi
autobiographical "A Perfect Spy."
le Carre leaves Smiley behind and
wanders off his well-beaten path in
an attempt to deal with the true
nature of espionage and deceit.
Unfortunately, le Carre isn't the
only one who wanders. The novel
does the same throughout its 475
pages. It tells the story of Magnus
Pym. a senior member of "The
Firm" of British intelligence who
runs agents in Czechoslovakia
from his post in Vienna until one
day he vanishes. But le Carre is not
content to tell Pym's story from one
viewpoint. Instead, the story pro
ceeds on two different yet parallel
levels, and as a result is neither as
gripping nor as believable as it
might have been.
The first level is the mad search
for Pym after his disappearance, a
search conducted by both sides of
the Iron Curtain. This is relatively
run-of-the-mill stuff and serves to
introduce those around Pym and
to show the perfect spy through the
eyes of his friends and colleagues.
This is interesting but is passionless
and sparkles only when Pym's wife
is on the stage.
The second level is vastly more
intriguing, for it is really the story
of the "perfect spy," told by Pym
in a letter to his son Tom and in
a letter to one of his two great
mentors. Through these letters, we
come to know Magnus Pym. His
life is shaped and dominated by
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three great authority figures, all of
whom are supposed to be larger
than life. His childhood is domi
nated by the figure of his father,
a con man who leaps from sting
to sting with no thought of the
future, who is able to command the
utmost in loyalty and has no
compunction about exploiting it, a
man for whom deception is life
itself.
From his father. Pym bounces
toward Jack Brotherhood, an
English agent who begins to mold
Pym while he is caught in Swit
zerland by the failure of one of his
father's infinite schemes. It is
Brotherhood who subtly, yet last
ingly, drops Pym on the road
toward espionage by leading him
to commit his first and most
devastating betrayal. And it is
Brotherhood, ironically, who
pushes Pym to the other side, into
the arms of his final mentor, a man
who recognizes that Pym is in fact
the perfect spy and uses that
recognition to his advantage.
In certain ways, the novel works
on this level. The whole metafic
tional notion of a book within a
book that is the picture of le Carre
as Pym. is very appealing. And the
way this perfect spy's character is
fleshed out bit by bit through the
letters is fascinating.
At the same time, the develop
ment of Pym's personality is simply
too overt, too crude and therefore
out of place in his world, a world
seemingly obsessed with subtlety.
Le Carre leaves no questions about
Pym. no room for this man's self.
Instead the reader is hit over the
head with how Pym was destined
to be a spy, how his father's actions
and those of his mentors created
a man for whom deceit and espion
age became not second, but first,
nature. That makes Pym's ability
to reconcile the two diverse strands
of his adult existence believable.
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But the fact that Pym is depicted
as a mere artifact, someone sculp
ted out of the raw material of youth
with no say in the matter until he
rebels at the end, makes le Carre's
description of him as a terribly
impressive man, a man with charm,
wit and incisiveness, a quite simply
unconvincing portrait.
More disturbingly, the entire
"love is betrayal" theme comes
from out of left field. It is as if
le Carre wanted the story to tell
the theme but couldn't figure out
how to do it, so he had the
characters say it constantly. And
so frustratingly, by the end the
reader feels only as if a grand
opportunity has been missed.
Richard Ford: "The
Sportswriter"
"The Sportswriter" is a brilliant
new novel by Richard Ford which
has far less to do with sports than
it does with life. The novel's hero
is Frank Bascombe, a 38-year-old
divorced sportswriter, who has two
kids and an ex-wife whom he refers
to only as "X." Bascombe is the
rarest of characters in modern
fiction, for he is a good man facing
a hard-nosed world with a tem
pered optimism and a willingness
to see what is right in others.
But Bascombe 's optimism is not
of the rose-colored glasses variety,
proceeding instead from a deeper
faith in the value of this world and
in what people make of it. After
years of self-pitying, pessimistic
anti-heroes, it is a tremendous
pleasure to meet Frank Bascombe.
In a strange way, he is an existen
tialist who has decided that exist
ence isn't so bad, and, as he says
near the end of the novel, some
times one can look around and
"suddenly feel pretty good."
The novel is, in the most super
ficial sense, the tale of what
happens to Bascombe over an
Easter week, right before he turns
39. And, indeed, a lot happens. The
reader sees his fight with his
girlfriend after an Easter dinner at
her house, his usual battles with his
ex-wife, and a touching exchange
with his son outside his old house.
There is a trip to Detroit to
interview a former football player
now confined to a wheelchair
which is one of the most powerful
sequences in the novel.
These are the events that define
Bascombe's existence, and one of
the points of the novel is that they
aren't very different from those that
define everyone's existence. The
difference comes not from the
events, but from how one
approaches them, how one deals
with the problems which make us
human.
There are no punches pulled in
what happens to Bascombe, and he
bounces from jubilation to mourn
ing and back again. But this very
uncertainty is part of what makes
life, and this novel, so damn
exhilarating and so good when
done right. Ford is a terrific writer,
with an expert eye for dialogue and
for the nuances of today's America.
This is a marvelous novel, full of
life and exuberanceRead it at all '
costs.