Customer Reviews

Christopher's Ghosts: A Paul Christopher Novel (Paul Christopher Novels)

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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.

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.

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.

"The Tears of Autumn" was the first Charles McCarry book I read, and after that I was hooked. The dust cover illustration of the 1975 edition showed a single dead, curling leaf bearing a faint image of JFK, reminiscent of the poem by Paul Verlaine, "Autumn Song". One reason the poem seems appropriate is that Paul Christopher, the leading character of this story, is a secret agent who used to be an amateur poet, a fact that makes him more attractive to women.

Not that he's a promiscuous James Bond. Rather he's the deeply loyal, strong and silent type, adept at ferreting out the truth in a world of lies, a spy who uses his intelligence rather than a gun. In this case, he's trying to discover the reasons and the people behind the 1963 Kennedy assassination. But the real attraction of this book is McCarry's writing, which is so rich with knowledgeable detail and vivid description of European cities and Vietnam, and draws on his background with the CIA in Europe, Asia, and Africa.

There was something appealing about the Christopher character, but he is missing in "The Better Angels" (1979), which I have read a number of times and is definitely McCarry's best novel. It's filled with many long dialogue-free passages of elegant writing in which we are introduced to the unpretentiously aristocratic Hubbard family, relatives of Paul Christopher, whose two half-brothers play a leading role in Washington politics and foreign espionage. As others have pointed out, there is a remarkable prescience in the way the story, set at the close of the 20th Century, interweaves CIA involvement in the Arab world, the power of oil, the influence of TV news, a scandal involving an incumbent President, and an election subtly stolen by a few people hacking into key computers.

Recently opening this book again, I found a newspaper article from 1992 in which McCarry said there would definitely not be another Paul Christopher novel. He also talked about being a ghostwriter on memoirs written by Reagan Administration figures, Donald Regan and Alexander Haig. Meanwhile, his novels (of which I have bought, read, and saved everyone) have grown steadily worse. The reason I keep buying them is, like I said, similar to the way a drug addict tries to recapture their initial high.

So I was pleasantly surprised by the feeling I got from the first half of "Christopher's Ghosts". Not only is the story set in the past--- Christopher is only sixteen-- but it seemed more like the younger McCarry's writing. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it has a distinctive voice and tone-- relying heavily on self-assured, declarative sentences that always incorporate some interesting fact or image--that was there again and reminded me of his earlier books. Then came the first short chapter of Part Two, which is so poorly written that it almost comes as a shock. The narrative has resumed after twenty years, when Christopher suddenly encounters on a street the former Gestapo major responsible for the death of his Jewish girlfriend. There ensues an absurd chase scene that isn't a bit believable, during which Stutzer, the Nazi officer, eludes the athletic and much younger Christopher. If you keep reading past this point, Christopher eventually tracks him down and kills him, of course, or we wouldn't have had a Part Two and a novel-length book.

A reviewer for the L.A. Times said it almost seemed to her that the two sections were written decades apart, and I totally agree. It's like the first half was ghostwritten by the real McCarry-- if that metaphor makes sense-- while the inferior writer that he has now become finished the book later on. Even if this isn't actually what happened, it's the feeling the reader gets. If you're a fan of McCarry, buy this book by all means, but prepare yourself for a let down a little over half way through.

McCarry writes well. He can convey the sense of surreal involved in living in Berlin during the rise of National Socialism. His characters are believable and the circumstances are well known. There were a few glitches in the editing (at one point Thursday becomes Wednesday), and a few anachronisms (cheap digital watches in 1961). It's a good spy novel written by an ex spy.

I found the ending unsatisfying, though, and a little heavy handed.

All in all, a good read.

I read this book after hearing praise for Charles McCarry and buzz for his newest book. I decided to see what he was all about. I can only assume he earned his reputation on books better than this one. I was quite disappointed.

Publisher's Weekly proclaims that the "book speeds toward a satisfying, inevitable conclusion." While the ending is inevitable (i.e. known to the reader far too many pages in advance), it is wholly unsatisfying in several respects.

On the mundane level, one of the key aspects of a thriller is suspense and twists of plot. Christopher's Ghosts fails to adequately deliver, particularly with respect to the main action involving the protagonist Paul and his arch-enemy Stutzer. Simply noting that Paul is the protagonist, his arch-enemy is Stutzer, and that the conclusion is "inevitable" constitutes a spoiler.

On a deeper level, the denouement is supposed to be, one assumes, karmically satisfying in that Paul is finally able to exorcise his "ghosts" in a place and manner evocative of their origin. This too convenient ju-jitsu feels (a) contrived and (b) extraordinarily insufficient to satisfy the moral demands of history. Giving much more detail here would perhaps be too much, but suffice to say that, having been a particularly nasty SS-officer, Stutzer makes woefully inadequate payment for his crimes.

There is a fair amount of action, but it is frequently implausible. While there are some interesting characters, the plot they are meant to advance is too forced and its conclusion too unedifying.

If you are already a McCarry fan, you will likely want to read this one. If you are not, I suggest finding a better entry point into the man's body of work.

I cannot recommend this book.

A good spy novel, though not his best. McCarry, not for the first time, could use an editor with some technical know-how to catch the glitches and anachronisms.

This is the second McCarry novel I've read. What strikes you immediately about the series is the superb, atmospheric quality of the writing. On par with current writers Alan Furst, Daniel Silva, or John Lawton but with a more elegaic feel to the prose.

The story here was first rate. Prequels can be fun if they're credible and add texture to the entire series. This one does. I look forward to dipping into the series more

There are few characters in Western literature outside of Candide who suffer as much as Paul Christopher. His first love is killed by the Nazis, his mother is kidnapped by Reinhard Heydrich and disappears for fifty years, his father is murdered by the Communists and his wife betrays him. His own career is no better. He is wounded on Okinawa, friends are murdered, when he discovers the real assassins of JFK, his friend arranges for him to be captured by Red China where he spends ten years in solitary confinement. Throughout his ordeals, he never yields to self pity. He forges ahead with his principles intact. Mr. McCarry's Paul Christopher novels are a hymn to Kipling's Gods of the Copybook Headings.

The result is that when Christopher has the opportunity for a little payback, the result is immensely satisfying. Christopher's Ghosts is divided into two parts. In the first, we have the haunting tragedy of Christopher's first love. Mr. McCarry manages to evoke the tensions of Nazi Berlin while simultaneously recounting Christopher's tender teenaged romance with a lovely young German girl who has a Jewish grandparent. We also come to know a monstrous SS interrogator with an interest both in the young woman and in the Christopher family. The second part of the novel occurs about twenty years later when Christopher finds and hunts down the interrogator, now working for East Germany. The ending, abrupt and efficient, is perfect.

As with all of McCarry's novels, there is not an excess of violence, but the mood and the setting, which reminds me quite a bit of Alan Furst's writing, create a tension that keeps you turning the pages. Mr. McCarry is the master of the espionage novel, without the transparent gimmicks and stupid moral equivalence that you find in Le Carre.

I bought this book on the strength of the reviews on the cover. "There is no better American spy novelist. It's like the best parts of ten John le Carre novels all put together." Time

Utter garbage - clearly the reviewers are on the payroll of the Soviets.

"Somebody on the ground got close enough to smell cous-cous." Yep, those men in turbans are definitely nasty arabs.

The first half was pretty good, the second felt like it was written by some else. John McCain rather than John le Carre!

Don't waste your time.