The Amateur Spy
By Dan Fesperman
Knopf / 372 pages / $24.95
The role of the thriller in modern literature is vastly underrated. Genre fiction routinely gets short shrift in both critical reviews and literary exegeses. But in the post-Sept. 11 world, political thrillers, particularly those focused on espionage and the fluidity of political affiliations and allegiances, tell a story that is dramatically germane to the way we live now.
Baltimore novelist and former Sun reporter Dan Fesperman writes top-flight thrillers. His latest, The Amateur Spy, blends Tom Clancy's readability with Robert Ludlum's insider touch and a soupcon of Graham Greene anomie. The result is an intensely provocative tale about how we live in a world where terrorism is a given, mayhem presumed and genocide little more than collateral damage. Who our friends and enemies are shifts from day to day, country to country, ethnic boundary to ethnic boundary. Can we always discern the difference between the good guys and the bad guys? Or are such distinctions a pre-Sept. 11 concept entirely?
At 55, Freeman Lockhart is a newly retired United Nations aid worker. Once highly placed with a resume that includes every world hot spot of the past two decades from Palestine to Rwanda to Bosnia to Tanzania, he's bought a small house on a rocky hillside on the sparsely populated Aegean isle of Karos, where he hopes to live out his days as a kind of nouvelle gentleman farmer, with goats and olive trees and a beautiful wife 18 years his junior.
Life in the disaster and relief game was less than satisfying, and Lockhart was burned out. So, it seems, was his wife, Mila, 37. Mila's a refugee of the Bosnian nightmare of the 1990s. The two met when Lockhart was doing relief work in Sarajevo and the then-21-year-old Mila found her way into the same business - which put her, as a Serb, at risk from all sides in the conflict. It wasn't long before she and Lockhart were spending war-torn nights on her fold-out cot in a makeshift office.
Their attempt to start a new life in this place that seems so unchanged since it was part of the seat of civilization is shattered early. Portents abound: Mila is sick on the boat to Karos. Lockhart is reminded of scene after scene of the sickening need in the many countries he has attended. Later, Mila has her own unpleasant memories: The taverna owner in their tiny town looks disturbingly like Radovan Karadzic.
But things are soon to get much worse. After christening their new home with sweetly languorous love-making, the two are awakened by three men in their bedroom. Two kidnap Lockhart, while the other remains with Mila. The leader of the three - Mr. Black - is an operative. CIA or something far less transparent? Lockhart doesn't know, but Black has a dossier on Lockhart that suggests his time in Africa was less savory than a former U.N. official would want to acknowledge. The operative blackmails Lockhart, whose secrets extend far beyond what Black already has on him.
The job: Take a position doing relief work in Jordan for an old colleague, Omar al-Baroody, who now seems to be in quite a different line of work than pure relief. There's money - lots of it - flowing into al-Baroody's hands. But it's not all going to help the beleaguered. So where is it going and which side of the terrorist divide is Lockhart's old friend on?
Lockhart wonders whether he can extricate himself from the immorality of spying on a friend. But he acquiesces to their demands and within days is off to Amman and a series of dramatic encounters - life-altering and life-threatening.
Meanwhile, in Washington, Aliyah Rahim, 45, is living a life of not-so-quiet desperation. The world of the Arab expatriate is not so easy post-Sept. 11. A car crash on Connecticut Avenue on the way to work reminds Aliyah and her husband, Abbas, a surgeon, yet again of their racial profile. There is never a moment when they are not under suspicion. And recent events involving their son and daughter have led them to an emotional and political precipice.
Aliyah has resumed going to mosque, seeking solace in prayer and God's absolution. Abbas, however, has lost all hope. He is close to falling into the abyss, and where that fall will take him, his family and possibly the highest-placed people in Washington is achingly near.
Fesperman, a former war correspondent, writes with an insider's knowledge of these places no one really wants to visit. In Fesperman's tale, Jordan and Jerusalem have that dark, insidious undercurrent to them that Mexico did for Greene. The Holy Land is so much less than holy, given those whose treacherous acts threaten to disrupt and destroy all that is decent in that endlessly ravaged place.
In The Amateur Spy, the award-winning Fesperman forces us to look at what Western greed and obliviousness have created in the areas of the world where people will do anything - anything - to survive. Fesperman's latest is a darkly compelling novel of post-Sept. 11 politics that leaves the reader turning pages and looking over his or her shoulder with equal rapidity.
Victoria A. Brownworth is the author and editor of more than 20 books. She teaches writing and film at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, including a course in genre literature, and writes a syndicated column. She is at work on a novel about Trotsky in Mexico.
EXCERPT
Just the thought of that time in our lives could still fry my brain with its flashbacks of horror and exhaustion. Unbearable suffering had unspooled before us like tales from the darkest passages of the Old Testament. Entire towns and provinces felled by plague, famine, and misfortune. And then we watched as the survivors were descended upon by blowflies, opportunists, and more aid workers, the only three species for miles around that managed to stay fully nourished.