In the midst of all the angst about Global Warming, the good news for spy watchers is that the Cold War is creeping back. Never mind that John le Carré, the creator of George Smiley — ‘the spy who came back from the cold’— proclaimed that “The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.” Never mind that it’s a long time now since the Berlin Wall came tumbling down followed by the inexorable cracks in the citadel of what once the invincible Soviet Union. Somewhere behind the impregnable walls of the Russian secret service in Moscow the moles are coming out into the cold.
They are aided by advances in the electronic surveillance industry and the highly sophisticated array of nerve gases and other difficult-to-trace chemicals that, as Silva reminds us, have killed real people.
Spies die hard
If we are to believe Silva and his spymaster Gabriel Allon — alas, not as sexy as our man Bond, but just as indestructible despite grave attempts on his life — the Cold War has intensified. There are many more players in the field now. It’s no longer between the two superpowers of the post-War decade of the 20th century, but a whole new game-changer with the Israelis getting into the act.
Oh, and did we mention that M16, the hallowed British Intelligence collecting service, is still very active, thank you very much. Still being served by men in elegant Saville Row suits who know when to throw a googly at an errant spy while sipping their Chardonnay in Belgian cut-glasses. The Chief in this case is Graham Seymour. In earlier times he would have been played onscreen by Michael Caine. Now one imagines it would be Benedict Cumberbatch, all supercilious eyebrows raised in tedious amusement at his Israeli counterpart as he tries to impress upon him that the mole at the very top of the Anglo-American intelligence establishment is — British!
Allon tells Seymour, “Old spies never die, Graham. They have eternal lives.” At this point, Cumberbatch-Seymour might well resist a yawn and say. “Tell-Aviv that, Allon. Be a good chap.”
At a glacial pace
Silva’s methods of laying a trail for his spooks across the length and breadth of the major cities of Europe, in London (is it still in Europe?), in Washington, in a remote village in Spain, in Tel Aviv, which is where Allon lives, with brief sorties into the frozen wastes of Russia, is more le Carré than Ian Fleming. That is to say he’s a plodder, or maybe a more appropriate term would be ‘plotter.’ Everything moves at a glacial pace. This is after all a Cold War. Without giving anything of the plot away, one might add: Beware of the Individual with Blue Eyes.
This is where Silva springs his greatest surprise. Halfway through the various botched assassinations and sundry executions, he presents the greatest spy of all times — Kim Philby — a key member of the Cambridge Five. He reprises the story from the point of Philby’s birth in British India in 1912. He tells us that he was named Kim after Rudyard Kipling’s famous boy-hero, the original Kim, who took part in the Great Game between Russia and the English.
Of course, he also had blue eyes, a tendency to stammer that made him somehow more irresistible to the women he seduced with effortless regularity, leaving them with children whom he then ignored for the most part.
Remember Allon’s cryptic remark about old spies never dying? They leave their genetic imprint on treason and on intellectual hunger for the Communist way of life, despite its proven inability to deliver, long after the Philbys have drunk their last vodka. In his earlier books, Allon has suffered badly at the hands of the Russians. This is perhaps what gives him the edge in tracking down Philby’s ‘Other Woman,’ leading to a tense chase through the suburbs of Washington to a secret Philby left behind in Maryland.
Not so much Cold War thriller then, but Boys’ Own Adventure, with Graham Seymour standing by to give the memory of Kim Philby a fitting finale.
The Chennai-based writer is a critic and cultural commentator.
