Reheating the Cold War

In the days when the Cold War provided depth and context to all spy fiction, Charles McCarry was the strongest of the contenders for the title of ‘the American John Le Carré’. Although Robert Littell and Paul Hennisart wrote novels of complex moral ambiguity, McCarry’s CIA was closer in tone to Smiley’s Circus, chosen from society’s elite, products of the best prep (the American equivalent of public) schools and Yale’s secret societies (one of which, Skull and Bones, has produced both candidates in this year’s US presidential election), honourable schoolboys pursuing a business whose currency is dishonour.

His protagonist, Paul Christopher, made his debut in McCarry’s first novel, The Miernik Dossier. Brilliantly constructed as a patchwork of documents, it introduced Christopher, as if inadvertently, late in the book. In The Tears of Autumn, his only bestseller, Christopher discovered the place where espionage and politics intersect, the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy, while his best book, The Secret Lovers, was very much in Le Carré territory, where those who practise deceit find themselves at odds with the very idea of love.The best of America’s elite, no less than Britain’s, turn out to be cold and isolated emotionally.

Christopher appeared for a final time 20 years ago in The Last Supper. Meanwhile, McCarry had introduced Christopher’s nephew, Horace Hubbard, in The Better Angels, perhaps the first novel to deal with suicide bombers. McCarry later wrote the saga of the Christopher family’s settling in America as an 18th-century romance, The Bride of the Wilderness. Hubbard reappeared in Shelley’s Heart, a wild conspiracy novel which reads like Richard Condon updated for the fin de siècle. Five years ahead of 2000, Hubbard fixes an American presidential election, which is prescience, and perhaps blueprint when one considers the CIA and the Yale connections of the Bush family.