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June 17, 2004
• McCarry's new thriller is a treat The Changing Scene McCarry's new thriller is a treat The McCarry family of Otis goes back a long way in Berkshire history but I was friends with just two of them, Miles, an icon in area cattle breeding, and his younger brother, Charles, a former spook for the Central Intelligence Agency. Miles moved to Florida from the Berkshires but remained quite active in his field. In 2002, the National Dairy Shrine gave him their first 4-E Award for exemplifying "Extra Energy, Effort and Enthusiasm" for the organization. And in 2000 he was voted Wisconsin Dairy Person of the Year. Charles hasn't won these kinds of honors in his writing career, but his eight novels have been internationally acclaimed for their thrilling accounts of the spy trade, their beautiful writing and their insights into the human psyche. His classic spy novel, "The Miernik Dossier," was the first of four novels dealing with the Christopher family, Berkshire born and bred, who were the fictional arches on which the Central Intelligence Agency plots were built. McCarry, who was born in 1930, was able to write so intelligently about the CIA because he worked as a CIA agent in Europe and Africa in the 1950s during the "Cold War," lugging satchels of money around Europe and Africa as the United States did its best (or worst) to make friends, influence people and destroy enemies. He wrote articles and stories for The Saturday Evening Post and later on became a special correspondent and editor for National Geographic. Meanwhile, the books poured out after McCarry retired from spooking. He even wrote a biography of Ralph Nader, which brought the Nader fanatics down on his head. And he "helped" Alexander Haig write his memoirs titled "Inner Circle: How America Changed the World." Which we are still doing, by the way. But it is the spy novels centered around the Christopher family of Berkshire County that have brought McCarry fame and a comfortable "retirement." The last time I had lunch with him at the Red Lion Inn some years ago I had the impression that he was packing in his weapons except perhaps for an occasional political assessment on The New York Times editorial page. How wrong I was because we now have "The Old Boys" (The Overlook Press), McCarry's latest adventure novel centered on the Christophers. Only this time around things are somewhat different. The "old boys" are retired CIA agents and officials who rally around when Paul Christopher's cousin, Horace Hubbard, has disappeared and presumed dead. Except that Hubbard believes that Christopher has faked his death and is on a quest to find his mother, Lori, who is somewhere in her 90s, and also somewhere in Eastern Europe or Asia or the Middle East or somewhere else. There is also a problem with an Islamic fanatic who has the money to buy portable nuclear bombs from Russia and blow various parts of the United States into kingdom gone. Thus we have this group of elderly men who still have their marbles but not enough strength to take over a junior high school in a Connecticut suburb. They are up against former Nazis, Chechen goons, the intelligence apparatus of China and parties unknown. The locales move from continent to continent with aplomb, and, oh yes, there is also a subplot that involves Jesus Christ having been a secret agent whose handler was Judas who was working for a Roman official named Paul. The writing is as lively as ever and the ruminations of the author are the kind that make you think. When queried, McCarry said the idea for the novel had been "kicking around" in his mind for years, "as had the Jesus apocrypha." "After being accused for almost 40 years of writing thrillers when I thought I was writing naturalistic novels about the life-and-death struggle between East and West for the soul of mankind, I was attracted to the notion of deliberately writing an actual thriller. That's what I attempted to do even though I know none of the rules of the genre. "I resigned from the CIA almost 40 years ago. Nearly everyone I served with is dead and I don't know a soul in the business today. Consequently, I don't have a clue as to how the new agency stacks up against the old one. As to the 9/11 intelligence failure, it is certainly real, but there is nothing new about intelligence failures. We didn't know that the Lakota and Cheyenne were going to get together and wipe out Custer, or that a German U-boat was going to sink the Lusitania, or that the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor, or that the Chinese were going to intervene in Korea (though we were convinced that they were going to intervene in Vietnam). Maybe some things are just unknowable, or are the doings of the gods. Or that an intelligence service is just not the proper instrument for discovering the untrivial and maybe we should try something else. As Horace Hubbard muses in 'The Old Boys,' penetrating a terrorist cell composed of two brothers and a cousin is a tough assignment." If you have never read McCarry, you are in for a treat. If you are a McCarry fan, he's still got it. Charles McCarry will be reading from and signing copies of his new book, "The Old Boys," on Wednesday, July 7, from 6 to 8 p.m. The signing, co-sponsored by The Bookstore in Lenox and the Lenox Library, will be held at the Welles Gallery or the Reading Room at the Lenox Library. For information, call The Bookstore at 637-3390. |
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