My wife and I honeymooned in Berlin. A lot of folks are surprised by this but we’re not beach people. We like to explore histories, interesting cultural icons, the unusual. Berlin was perfect for that. We had a great nine days there and it was a good start to our marriage.
Berlin is sort of a Frankenstein’s monster of a city: a pastiche of prewar romanticism, total ruin, capitalist-western occupation and totalitarian communist occupation make up a sort of fascinating urban landscape. It is doing better in the present but has yet to fully escape its past.
Len Deighton’s book touches on the past. Deighton writes as someone who loves Berlin in spite of itself, whose main character’s reluctance to go there is less about the city and more about what he might discover in the course of his mission.
Bernard Samson is like many a Le Carré character: a frustrated spy bureaucrat whose path to advancement is blocked by the boarding school-types ahead of him. He’s sent to do a dirty, dangerous mission in a dirty, dangerous city. At the same time, he’s dragged into a kind of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy plot: someone is giving info to the Russians. Intelligence gathering becomes counterintelligence. Who is to blame?
Deighton’s plot is labrynthian but not impossibly so, unlike his British spy-writing counterpart. I was able to follow what was going on for the most part. The scenes in Berlin being far and away the best thing about the novel. Deighton brings what was at the time a dead city to life in a way that must have stimulated the curious reader.
Quentin Tarantino talked about adapting this at one point. Though it seems he passed, I think this would be fun. Less Inglourious Basterds set in East Germany, this would be akin to Jackie Brown, where people are talking, talking, talking their way to an explosive climax. Tarantino’s best scenes are those where folks are hanging out, shooting the breeze. There’s a lot of that here and it works for the novel.
The book can drag in spots but for the most part, this is a satisfying read that makes me want to dive headfirst into the trilogy, along with Deighton’s legendary Ipcress File.