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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Espionage at its best, May 13, 2007
This review is from: Christopher's Ghosts (Hardcover)
Shelling out $[...] for a hardcover is not something I'm likely do unless I really know an author, or I hear amazing things.
Well, many friends have been keen on McCarry for a long time, claiming he's one of the top writers of espionage, suspense/thriller fiction and most definitely in the same literary league with John LeCarre, Alan Furst, Eric Ambler and Ken Follett. I figured this was the one to jump on the bandwagon for after I googled it and read amazing reviews from every paper I looked at.
Then I bought said book. Today. (Well, yesterday- it's 1:10). And I finished it- today. So while work may be hell tomorrow- I'm going to tell you- read the reviews if you don't trust me, but treat yourself to this book.
McCarry's nuanced, at times poetic, writing style, his ability to create real, flesh and blood characters who will move you, and his fast-paced, taunt storylines, put him at the top of the list for craftsmanship and inventiveness.
If Christopher's Ghosts ended at the conclusion of part one, it would stand -- existential climax notwithstanding -- as a brilliant novella of real life and human values confronting Orwellian evil. A teenage Paul Chriistopher, finds himself and family at the mercy of the Nazis' relentless surveillance of and interference in every aspect of citizens' lives, its determination to enforce a manufactured hierarchy of racial purities, its thought-control justice system and brutal, lawless enforcement -- is based in fact allows the novel to transcend all speculative cliché. Readers are offered a chillingly credible picture of a society overwhelmed by tin gods, pointless rules, and paranoia, a world where the expected meritocracy is turned on its head and anyone with a uniform can give life-or-death orders. The book's second half fast-forwards to the Cold War, which finds Christopher a veteran CIA operative on the trail of one of his ghosts. Straying far off the CIA reservation (McCarry, who worked for the CIA himself as an inteligence operative who operated under deep cover, cloaks that agency under the nickname "the Outfit"), Christopher is out to settle a personal score with an escaped SS monster who's now in league with the KGB. This half of the chronicle wants the heartbreaking grace of the background chapters. Very likely that's intentional. McCarry's delivery here pales only by comparison (owing mostly to the relatively truncated narrative), and it suits the perspective of an older Christopher's wearily jaded outlook. And if the CIA's methods remind you of SS tactics, Christopher himself doesn't seem to notice.
TIME says of McCarry, "There is no better American spy novelist." I tend to agree.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Action, Political Intrigue, and Introspection, June 22, 2007
This review is from: Christopher's Ghosts (Hardcover)
In Christopher's Ghosts, veteran spy thriller author Charles McCarry takes the reader back to Paul Christopher's early days as youth in Berlin with his American father Hubbard and beautiful German mother Lori. The first half of the book is taken up with Christopher's passionate youthful romance with 'Rima' in the days immediately before WW II. Rima is the daughter of a renowned Jewish surgeon who has been ruined by the Reich (although not technically a Jew under that regime's twisted laws).
At the same time his mother attracts the attention of SS leader Reinhard Heydrich. Lori uses this relationship to help protect her family - up to a point.
The second part of the book picks up in 1959. Christopher is now a crack agent for the fledging US intelligence service. McCarry sends Christopher and the readers back to Cold War Berlin. The setting is shortly before the Wall goes up and Christopher is on a mission that dually serves his own ends as well as broader American interests.
McCarry uses Christopher's experiences to explore the uses of physical and psychological torture and its impact on torturer and victim. In doing so he holds a mirror up for the contemporary reader, not in a heavy-handed way, but one is led to uncomfortable reflections about the capacity of humans to inflict unspeakable suffering in what the torturers perceive as a good cause.
McCarry's newest effort satisfies more than his recent (and somewhat fantastic) Old Boys. If it falls short of his classic Tears of Autumn: A Paul Christopher Novel, well that's the price of writing a great novel in one's early days as an author. Christopher's Ghosts carries the reader back to the fear-filled days of the Reich in the fullness of its powers as well as the relentlessly gray days of Cold War deprivation in East Berlin.
Highly recommended, especially for fans of the spy genre. There is action here to satisfy the thrill-seeker, but McCarry also delivers political intrigue and personal introspection.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Memory and Retribution., August 29, 2007
This review is from: Christopher's Ghosts (Hardcover)
Paul Christopher is haunted by memory. And in this new outing for Charles McCarry's CIA operative, he reaches back into the memories begun in The Last Supper, to again delineate the lives and fates of his extraordinary parents in pre WWII Nazi Germany. But in this recall, Paul is now a teenager and we learn of his first love, an exceptional young half-Jewish woman, naturally in peril in the dreadful world of post-Nuremburg Law Berlin.
Paul's parent's anti-Nazi activities have everyone in peril, and McCarry's description of the fear and tension of living in a world wherein the whims of a Gestapo chief could have you killed on-the-spot, a world in which there is a ruthless, albeit insane logic that can be enforced upon you at any second, without recourse or protest, is conveyed convincingly and chillingly.
Chief amongst the purveyors of terror is the Gestapo head, Stutzer, introduced to us in Last Supper and contemptuously dismissed and humiliated by Paul's mother in particular. He has the power now, and he will pay back these insults many times over with terror and humiliation of his own.
Suffice it to say, tragedy is the outcome of these encounters involving the first half of the book. The second half commences with Paul Christopher seeing this self-same Stutzer on the streets of post-WWII Occupied Berlin in 1959 and the subsequent cat-and-mouse game that is played as Paul seeks revenge for the many crimes committed by this loathsome man against both humanity and more particularly against Paul Christopher's loved ones.
A good read with Charles McCarry doing what he does best, examining the character and psyche of people in dangerous and terrifying circumstances. That, and he has a fine sense of the tender devotions between men and women in love, and his depiction of first love is sensitive and sure. Well worthwhile.
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