Review of Philip Kerr's The Other Side of Silence

I should start by saying that Philip Kerr's The Other Side of Silence (Marian Wood Books/Putnam, March 29, 2016) is the 11th book in the standout Bernie Gunther series and, if you’re not familiar with the series, you should start with March Violets, the book that introduces us to Bernie as a private investigator in 1936 Berlin. Philip Kerr hasn’t written the series in chronological order––in fact, some of the later books in the series are set several years before that first one––but your reading experience will be so much richer if you start with the first books. For the rest of this review, I’ll assume the reader is familiar with the series.


This is another one of Kerr’s dual-narrative novels, which he’s done a few times with Bernie. It starts in 1956, with Bernie working as a hotel concierge on the French Riviera. Because of his World War II misadventures as a reluctant aide to some big-time Nazi war criminals, he’s living under the false name Walter Wolf. The other narrative, which takes up only a couple of chapters, flashes back to 1945 Königsberg, East Prussia, when Bernie was in the German army, falling in love with a young radio operator while the Russian army encircled the city.

In 1956, Bernie’s life is uneventful, taken up with his job, playing bridge, and drinking away the time. That is, until he is invited to play bridge with the famous author Somerset Maugham, who lives in an opulent villa on the coast. Maugham, who had been a longtime agent for the British secret service (I didn’t know that, did you?), asks Bernie to help him deal with a blackmailer named Heinz Hebel. Bernie recognizes Hebel as Henning, a particularly despicable character whom Bernie had the displeasure of dealing with more than once, including in 1945 Königsberg.

Maugham called the French Riviera
"A sunny place for shady people"

Once this blackmail plot gets going, and you don’t have long to wait, it becomes a dizzyingly complex but thrilling game of Cold War espionage, betrayal, vengeance and revenge. And, as Bernie explains, there is a critical difference between vengeance and revenge.

The last Bernie book, The Lady From Zagreb, also has a plot that has one storyline about Bernie’s war experiences and another that is more espionage oriented. I liked that book, but I thought the espionage element was the much stronger storyline in that book. In this new book, the espionage plot is a far bigger part of the story. The flashback story is excellent, but it informs the bigger plot and blends well, which was not so much the case with The Lady From Zagreb. For me, this was a more successfully coordinated story, and it’s a particularly entertaining one if you know your Cold War espionage history.

Hey, Mr. Kerr, quit gazing soulfully
at the camera andvwrite faster!

My one criticism of this book concerns the romance element. As usual, Bernie has a romantic entanglement. This time around, it didn’t feel emotionally convincing. In fact, at the start, Kerr doesn't make it seem like Bernie even finds this woman attractive. But that’s a relatively minor problem, not enough to be of real concern. And that minor failing is more than made up for by the intricate plot and its clever denouement. I’m already impatient for Kerr’s promised 12th Bernie Gunther novel, Prussian Blue, coming in 2017.

Note: I received a free advance reviewing copy of the book from the publisher, via Amazon's Vine program. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Image sources: Amazon.com, bbc.co.uk, hollywoodreporter.com.

Review of John Lawton's The Unfortunate Englishman

The Unfortunate Englishman by John Lawton (Atlantic Monthly Press, March 1, 2016)

At the center of Lawton’s stylish new espionage thriller is that classic set-piece of the Cold War espionage novel, the exchange of imprisoned spies on a bridge between East and West Berlin. But it’s the story of how the characters got there, physically and emotionally, that propels the story.

Protagonist Joe Wilderness (born John Wilfrid Holderness) is an agent for MI-6, given the task in 1965 of arranging to swap KGB deep-cover agent Bernard Alleyn for a hapless English businessman caught adding a little spying to his business trips to the USSR. We learn how Alleyn lived a thoroughly conventional English life for 20 years before being nabbed by British intelligence. On the other side, Geoffrey Masefield, a metallurgist, is betrayed by his own romantic notions of spydom and the incompetent ambitions of his British handler.

But the story that matters most is Wilderness’s. This novel begins in 1963, just where its predecessor, Then We Take Berlin (reviewed here) left off, with Joe being in a heck of a predicament as a result of an East/West smuggling operation gone spectacularly awry during JFK’s famous visit to Berlin that summer. We jump around between there and 1961, as well as 1965 and even all the way back to 1946, when Joe was an army sergeant, black marketeer and British intelligence agent in the chaos, romance and ethical soup that was Berlin after the World War II shooting war stopped and the Cold War was in its infancy. Coming back to Berlin in the 1960s isn’t easy for Joe; it brings back bittersweet memories and forces him to deal with some of his old black market contacts.

Joe Wilderness is one of my favorite espionage thriller characters. Born into East End poverty, trained in thievery by his burglar grandfather, talent-spotted after being drafted into the army at the end of World War II and educated in the languages, history and politics you’d want any Cold Warrior to know, Joe is as smart, conflicted and cynical as any Raymond Chandler character. In his world, moral ambiguity is the norm and he doesn’t waste his time putting his faith in any person or ideal. Still, he has a heart, even if he opens it up only occasionally and reluctantly.

Another strong point of the novel is John Lawton’s evocation of time, place and atmosphere. It’s hard to find a more fascinating time and place than Cold War Berlin, but Lawton still uses his narrative skills to transform history into gripping fiction. His description of barbed wire going up right through the middle of Berlin in 1961 had me gripping the book so hard my hand cramped, even though I know the history well. Lawton is a master at weaving the historical facts into the threads of his fictional story and bringing both to vivid life.

I’ve been debating whether I’d say that it’s necessary to read the first Joe Wilderness novel, Then We Take Berlin, before reading The Unfortunate Englishman. It’s definitely not absolutely necessary, and I’d hate for anybody to miss out on this book, but I have to recommend reading Then We Take Berlin first. That’s where you get Joe’s full and extremely colorful background, which adds extra richness to the plot of The Unfortunate Englishman.

If you like the Joe Wilderness books, Lawton also has a terrific series featuring Metropolitan Police detective Frederick Troy. The series begins with Black Out: An Inspector Troy Thriller and its titles are set during World War II and various times thereafter, through the 1960s.

Note: The publisher provided a free advance reviewing copy of The Unfortunate Englishman. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Image sources: bookdepository.com, bridgeofspies.com, harper-ganesvoort.com.

Review of Heda Margolius Kovály's Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street

Innocence: Or, Murder on Steep Street, by Heda Margolius Kovály (Soho Crime, June 2, 2015)

After World War II, Czechoslovakia had a brief period of democracy until 1948, when it fell to a Communist coup and became a satellite of the USSR. Like so many European Communist states during the Stalin era, party apparatchiks could suddenly find themselves accused of imaginary crimes against the state and lose their positions or even their lives. State Security officials and their informants monitored and reported on activities of ordinary citizens, so that one never knew if co-workers, friends or even family members could be trusted not to be informers.

That’s the background of Heda Margolius Kovály's Innocence, Or Murder on Steep Street. Helena Novákova's world is turned upside down when she loses her job at a publishing house and her husband is arrested and imprisoned as a spy. He isn't, but truth isn't a priority in the paranoid security state.

Fruit and vegetable store in 1950s Prague

Now Helena is an usher at the Horizon cinema in Prague, along with several other female ushers, a manager, a concessionaire and a lone male projectionist. When a young boy visiting the theater is murdered, all of the staff fall under official scrutiny. There doesn't seem to be any mystery about whodunnit, but all the other staff members still have plenty of secrets, veiled by layers of lies.

At the same time that we read about the dual lives of the various Horizon staff members, another thread is Helena's attempts to find help for her husband. These two threads come together in an unexpected way. It's intriguing, but the wrap-up is murky and strays past enigmatic to confusing. In a few other places the writing lacks clarity. Overall, though, I still found it a very readable and atmospheric story.

credit: Marie Šechtlová

It might seem a little strange to have a crime novel told in hardboiled style when it's set in Prague in the 1950s, but I got used to it quickly, especially since the stripped-down bluntness of the style fits the bleak, paranoid time and place. When you find out that Kovály was herself a translator of Raymond Chandler's books, it makes even more sense.

Knowing Kovály's own story isn't necessary to appreciate this stark story of pervasive falsity and fear, but I think it does add something when you know how close this was to home for her. She and her first husband were Holocaust survivors who made it home to Prague, where her husband became an enthusiastic Communist. He was caught up in the infamous Slánský show trials and was executed. When you know that, Helena's thoughts and actions are especially moving.

If you're interested in knowing more about Kovály, read her stunning memoir, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague, 1941-1968.

Notes: I received a free advance review copy of the book. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.

Review of Joseph Kanon's Leaving Berlin

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon (Atria Books, March 3, 2015)

I've always enjoyed Joseph Kanon's books, which are thrillers set in various places around the world, but all taking place shortly after World War II.  Kanon mines that same ground over and over because it's one of the richest veins of material you could ever hope to find.  The war has ended, but not the fighting. It is just a different kind of battle, and the players shifted around. No more Allies fighting Nazis; now it's the Cold War, with Berlin being dead center in the new conflict.

Alex Meier, Leaving Berlin's protagonist, had been a celebrated young novelist in Germany in the 1930s.  Alex was a Social Democrat with a Jewish father, and neither one of those were good things to be once the Nazis took over. But he was friends with the younger members of the powerful von Bernuth family, and their father got Alex out of the country before it was too late.  Alex's parents never got out.

Alex made a new home in the US, married and had a son. Then, along came the Red Scare and, suddenly, a young German socialist was in danger from the government yet again. To avoid being deported from the US permanently and losing all contact with his son, Alex agrees to act as a US government agent by returning to Berlin for a time; in particular to the Soviet Occupied Zone, where several other leftist German exiles had returned, the most prominent being playwright Berthold Brecht. Alex's assignment is to provide information about his friends in the new Germany, and if he does a good job, the promise is that he can return to the US.

Berlin in 1949 was about the most interesting place imaginable. Interesting in the usual sense, but also in the sense of the old curse, "May you live in interesting times."  The city was divided into four occupation zones for each of the Allied powers, but there was no Berlin Wall yet.  Tensions between the Soviets and the other Allies were increasing by the day, as the Soviets tried to squeeze the Allies out of the city, deep within the eastern half of the country, which the Soviets planned as a satellite state.

Along with the political and military Cold War, there was also a so-called Cultural Cold War. The Soviets and the West vied for superiority in literature, music, theater and all the other arts. The Soviets lavished privileges on artists who could burnish the reputation of communism around the world. Alex, who is well remembered as a novelist, is welcomed warmly in the Soviet Occupied Zone and treated as a valued member of the new socialist dream society. As an instantly prominent artist comrade, he can eat and drink off ration at the Kulturbund and is awarded a nice apartment all to himself, with a view to the street rather than the drab rear.

Alex quickly finds that Berlin is full of secrets and lies, with danger and betrayal all around him. This is no longer the city of his youth. His childhood home is rubble and his old and new friends may not be what they seem. Alex's reconnecting with his old love, Irene von Bernuth, who is now the mistress of a high-level Soviet military man, excites his US intelligence contacts, but it endangers Alex's heart and much more. What was supposed to be a quick and easy job soon turns deadly dangerous, and Alex must rely on his wits to save himself and those he still feels loyal to.

I've read a lot of espionage thrillers, but this one has one of the most satisfyingly twisty-turny plots ever; enough to make your head spin and heart pound. Along with the complex and exciting plot, Kanon delivers a large cast of realistic characters, starting with Alex, but also including childhood friends (especially Irene von Bernuth), Soviet officers, Alex's minder from the Party, intelligence contacts and more. Kanon also has a gift for invoking the atmosphere of the ruined city and what Berliners do to survive in the new reality.

This is Kanon's second book set in Berlin, with the first being The Good German (2002), made into a movie starring George Clooney and Cate Blanchett. This is a very different story, but also one that would make a terrific film. I feel sure of that, because Kanon's powerfully evocative writing turned it into a story that played out in my head as a movie while I was reading.

Another particular strength of the book is the focus on the return to East Berlin of so many members of the cultural and intellectual elite who missed their homeland and were true believers in the communist cause. They included Brecht and writers like Arnold Zweig, Anna Seghers and Stefan Heym.

Initially celebrated and given privileges not available to others in the workers' state, the returnees who spent the Nazi years in the West, rather than in Moscow, soon found their situations changed. Stalin and his henchmen began an "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign in 1950, targeting those who had spent time in the West. Many were expelled from the Communist Party, imprisoned on trumped-up charges and worse. If you'd like to read more on the subject, you might try Edith Anderson's Love In Exile: An American Writer's Memoir of Life in Divided Berlin (Steerforth Press, 1999). Or, to read about Bertold Brecht's tumultuous history with his native country, as well as his friends, colleagues and lovers, check out a new book by Pamela Katz: The Partnership: Brecht, Weill, Three Women, and Germany on the Brink (Nan A. Talese, January 6, 2015).

Note: Thanks to the publisher for providing a review copy, via NetGalley.

The Berlin Wall

As I'm sure you already know, this week saw the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall––or, as those pranksters in the old German Democratic Republic called it, the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart." I'm reading a fascinating book about it, Mary Elise Sarotte's The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.

If it were not for the tragic destruction of lives caused by the Wall, the story of its permanent breach in 1989 would be comic. One Politburo guy says the wrong thing at a press conference, suggesting the Wall is open, and the next thing you know, hordes of people from both sides swarm the area around the Brandenburg Gate and checkpoints throughout the city. On that cold night in November, there was almost a party atmosphere to the gatherings, especially once the guards, who had not been told in advance about any new rules, started letting people through.

Of course, there's a lot more to the story than one simple slip-up at a press conference. Sarotte zeroes in on a dozen people whose names you've likely never heard, and shows how their experiences illustrate the factors that came together to bring an end to the division between the two Berlins and, ultimately, the end of Communism in eastern Europe.

If you want to read more about the Wall than its collapse, the definitive history is Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989. This is a masterful work of historical research and writing. One of the things Taylor reminds us is that, horrific as the Wall was for so many people, it served the political ends of both East and West. East Germany was losing all of its most productive citizens to West Germany, and this worked to ratchet up the tensions that threatened to turn the Cold War hot. The Wall stabilized the political situation and, in effect, those on the wrong side of it paid the price for a degree of peace and safety in the rest of the world.

About the only thing to regret about the end of the Cold War is that it nearly dried up the supply of Cold War espionage novels. To me, the very best spy stories are the Cold War stories, and you can't beat Berlin as the locale.

The lodestone is, of course, John le Carré's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, made into a movie featuring Richard Burton as the depressive MI-6 operative Alec Leamas. Le Carré is the king of moral ambiguity, and there's plenty of that in this novel about double agents. The climax takes place at the Wall, shortly after its erection.

Len Deighton's Bernard Samson series consists of three trilogies and a prequel. The first book, Berlin Game, has jaundiced MI-6 officer Samson traveling to Berlin to deal with the crisis of their valuable agent, Brahms Four, wanting to defect. Complicating things, Samson is also aware that there is a mole among his colleagues, and the presence of that mole may jeopardize Samson's mission––and much more.

Berlin Game, and the other two volumes in its trilogy, were adapted to a 12-part miniseries called Game, Set and Match. Though this was televised in the late 1980s, it looks like it's not available on DVD or streaming video.

I've written about John Lawton's Then We Take Berlin here. It takes place mainly in Berlin, both immediately after World War II, when the city was divided up into zones controlled by the four allied powers and it was relatively easy for people to pass from zone to zone, and then in 1963, after the Wall has been built. Our protagonist, a Cockney known as Joe Wilderness, had a wild time when he was stationed in Berlin after the war. In his spare time from sniffing out Nazis for the army, Joe was a wheeler-dealer in the black market. In 1963, he's persuaded to return to Berlin to smuggle an old woman out of East Berlin.

John Lawton is one of my very favorite novelists, with characterization being his strong suit. Then We Take Berlin not only introduces a new and striking protagonist, it also has a large supporting cast of vivid characters, some of whom you'll recognize from Lawton's Frederick Troy series. The Berlin setting is a big bonus.

This one's not a spy novel, but I think it's a must-read for anybody interested in what life was like on the eastern side of the Wall. Anna Funder's Stasiland tells stories of various people who lived in East Germany. Some were resisters, but some were informants for the East German Ministry for State Security, aka the Stasi.

The Stasi was by far the largest surveillance agency in history. Some estimate that there was a full-time secret police officer for every 180 people in East Germany. Almost worse than the official Stasi officers was the fact that so many civilians routinely informed on their co-workers, neighbors, friends, family and even loved ones. Since the reunification of Germany, Stasi files have been made available, and many people have requested to read their files, with traumatic results.

Of course, there are many, many other books about the Berlin Wall and East Germany, both fiction and non-fiction, but this short list of some of my favorite books will give you a start if you're interested in diving in.

More TV!

The Game

This six-part espionage miniseries began on Wednesday on BBC America. It's a moody, stylish production set in 1972 England, then in the midst of a lengthy miners' strike that caused power outages even at MI-5 headquarters. A KGB officer named Arkady Malinov gets himself arrested for public drunkenness and assault on a police officer so he can tell MI-5 that he wants to defect and act as a double agent. Malinov claims he wants to act as a double agent so he can reveal to the British what he learns about the Soviet-planned Operation Glass.

What's Operation Glass? Well, Malinov doesn't really know, but he knows it's huge and will change forever the status of the Cold War. It involves agents the USSR has in the UK, and Malinov says he'll let MI-5 know who they are whenever he finds out. Although they feel sure Malinov isn't telling all he knows, MI-5's counterespionage team, which calls itself the Fray, gets to work.

The team is headed by the MI-5 chief, code-named Daddy, and played by that craggy-faced lion, Brian Cox. Daddy's second is Bobby Waterhouse, a snakelike conniver who lives with his mother, a woman who could give Angela Lansbury's character in The Manchurian Candidate a run for her money. Waterhouse's deputy is Sarah Montag, a sharp and ambitious analyst. Her husband, Alan, is socially awkward, but a whiz at the electronic eavesdropping side of the business. Secretary Wendy Straw is a young thing who doesn't have much to say so far. Seconded to the team from Special Branch is Detective Constable Jim Fenchurch, who thinks these MI-5 guys are much too full of themselves.

Our protagonist is the seventh member of the Fray, the young and beautiful Joe Lambe. You might remember him from PBS shows like the Silk miniseries and the recent remake of The Lady Vanishes. Joe is tormented by a failed mission in Poland, one that only Daddy knows the facts about. One of the things that Daddy knows is that a Soviet agent involved in that mission is in the UK, he's part of Operation Glass, and Joe's personal desire to kill this agent will be both a spur and a hazard.

From what I've read, it appears that each week of the series will focus on a new target revealed to the Fray by Malinov, whom the team will then try to use to find out more about Operation Glass. After just one episode, it's hard to tell how this series will shape up, but I'll definitely keep watching. It's got that moody look and music appropriate to Cold War espionage drama, and the actors are fun to watch. (Though I do wish they'd enunciate! It's a sad state of affairs when even British-trained actors mumble so much these days.) Each member of the Fray has his or her own secrets, there are tensions and conflicts between them, and their office-politics intrigues may turn out to be as much a focus of the series as Operation Glass.

The Game is on BBC America on Wednesday nights at 10:00pm Eastern time.

Death Comes to Pemberley

Did you watch the two-part Death Comes to Pemberley on Masterpiece Mystery? I did, and even though it doesn't seem quite right to say this about a Jane Austen-ish adaptation, I thought it was a hoot.

Of course, this is based on P. D. James's novel of the same name. James imagined Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet six years after their marriage at the end of Pride and Prejudice. They are now living happily at Pemberley with their young son, and busily planning their annual dinner and dance for hundreds.

The festivities have to be cancelled when Lydia, Elizabeth's flibbertigibbet of a younger sister comes careening up the drive in a coach and then bursts out of its door, screaming that her husband, the ne'er-do-well Wickham, has been killed. Well, more's the pity, it quickly turns out that it's Captain Denny who's been killed. But Wickham is arrested for the crime, and that's even better than his being the murder victim if you're a Wickham hater––as all right-thinking people are, of course.

James's book was controversial. The most ardent fans of Jane Austen and P. D. James seemed to dislike it. A lot of Austen devotées dislike the whole genre of novels featuring later or re-imagined lives of Austen characters, and they disliked this book on principle; some especially because it was a crime novel. Many P. D. James fans thought the plot wasn't up to James's usual standards. But I liked the book. It wasn't a case of Mr. Darcy suddenly becoming a detective. Instead, there is a judicial investigation, and Darcy is stuck with having to try to clear a man he heartily detests, since having his brother-in-law hanged as a murderer will be a stain on the Darcy name. Meanwhile, Elizabeth learns a few things here and there that seem to provide some clues as to what really happened to Captain Denny.

The dramatization accentuates the soap-opera potential of the P. D. James plot. A love triangle involving Darcy's sister Georgiana is raised in importance, while the strain that this affair––and, of course, the murder––puts on Elizabeth and Darcy threatens their love. There are emotional scenes––well, as emotional as you can get in the Austen-esque environment. Elizabeth can't help but feel that Darcy is regretting his association with her family, especially since he goes into full Darcy remote mode as the pressure of events ratchets up.

Lydia stays at Pemberley during all this, and she's every bit as much of a drama queen as you'd anticipate. The Bennets come to stay as well, and Mrs. Bennet is just as you'd expect. It only takes a visit from Lady Catherine (played by Penelope Keith, who you'll remember from the Britcoms The Good Life a/k/a Good Neighbors, and To the Manor Born) to make the whole thing seem more like farce than a murder mystery. And I'm not complaining; as I said, I thought it was a hoot.

The acting is standard excellent British costume drama style. I do have a quibble, though. Anna Maxwell Martin plays Elizabeth and, while she's a wonderful actor and I loved her in The Bletchley Circle, she's not right for Elizabeth. Martin just isn't vibrant enough to play that character. She does it as well as she possibly could, but I was aware the whole time that she didn't fit the part. Matthew Rhys as Darcy is an excellent casting choice. I became familiar with him as Philip on FX network's Cold War espionage drama, The Americans, and he has more than enough handsome, brooding intensity for Mr. Darcy.

Review of Ellen Feldman's The Unwitting

The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman

What I want most of all, when I open a book, is to get that feeling right away that the author is going to tell me a story; that in that first couple of pages I will be taken into someone else's world. Ellen Feldman does that here in her new book, The Unwitting (Spiegel & Grau, May 6, 2014). There is a real sense of immediacy in her writing, and she gives her protagonist a warm, sometimes waspish, but always compelling voice.

A Prologue begins the story on the morning of November 22, 1963, with freelance journalist Nell Benjamin in the Manhattan apartment she shares with her husband, Charlie, and their young daughter, Abby. Just seeing that date at the head of the chapter lends the book's title, The Unwitting, a certain ominous weightiness. We know, though Nell doesn't, that President John F. Kennedy will be assassinated later that day. What Nell also doesn't know is that Charlie will be killed that day as well; supposedly murdered by a mugger in Central Park in broad daylight.

We flash back to Nell and Charlie's meeting in the years after World War II, in which they both served.  Students on the GI Bill at Columbia University, they fall deliriously in love. Both are politically engaged leftists and both are anti-Stalinists. And that matters in the 1950s, for of course this is the Red Scare era in the US, and the early years of the decades-long Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States.

Charlie, most of whose extended family were killed in the Holocaust, feels a keen sense of patriotic obligation to the US, and he is enthusiastic about being offered the editorship at Compass. Compass is a (fictional) literary journal with a liberal, but anti-Soviet, take on issues, and is backed by the moneyed Davenport Foundation.  This is an opportunity for Charlie to take part in the cultural Cold War that was also raging between east and west.

In addition to battling over politics and economics, the US and USSR struggled for cultural supremacy, with literature, theater, art, dance and music as ammunition. The Soviets trotted out their Bolshoi ballet, while the US focused on Broadway plays, jazz music and freedom in literature. One of the most intriguing events in the cultural Cold War was the western publication of Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, which is critical of the Soviet state.

With investigative journalism being part of her DNA, Nell can't help but wonder if Charlie's murder was really part of a random mugging, or if he was targeted for some other reason. And, as she goes through his papers, she begins to wonder more about whether Charlie had a secret life; whether his role in the cultural Cold War was more of a soldier than a volunteer.

Ellen Feldman so well depicts the numbness of Nell's suddenly becoming a young widow with a small child, followed by the flood of anger, confusion and other swirling emotions. Then, as Nell delves into Charlie's secrets, "I could not stop reliving my life backward. Not backward in time, but backward in perceptions and emotions." This is a perceptive examination of Nell's journey.

More than one woman's story, though, this is also a reflective and engrossing visit to one side of the Cold War that should be of particular interest to those who also came of age in that period. Not Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe on the table at the UN, or the duck-and-cover drills, but the hoopla over Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, battles between eastern and western judges at the Olympics and other international sports competitions, and troupes of actors, dancers, writers and artists traipsing through world capitals, all flags a-flutter.

The Unwitting is an emotionally and intellectually engaging read that feelingly and subtly examines the complexities of love, loyalty and morality. And it made me want to read Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (first published in 2000; second edition from New Press, 2013) and Petra Couvée's The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (Pantheon, June 17, 2014).

Note: I received a free review copy of The Unwitting. Versions of this review may appear on Amazon, Goodreads, BookLikes and other reviewing sites under my usernames there.