Customer Reviews

The Increment: A Novel

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(18)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My initial encounter with The Increment was unpromising: an omniscient narrator remarking about the actions of the central characters in Tehran and Washington. Fortunately, the narrator's voice was soon muted, and we were embroiled in a beautifully contrived tale of espionage, betrayal, and geopolitics. On one hand, the idealists; on the other, the cynical opportunists; caught in the middle, those who are revolted by both extremes.

I won't provide any spoilers, because you really should experience the twists and turns of this narrative for yourself. Ignatius gets extra points for the compelling picture he conjures up of contemporary Tehran (and the rest of Iran). However he loses a star for the gung-ho use of technology, and for a couple of lazily stereotyped characters. Taken together, these factors made a couple of his plot twists wholly implausible. But never mind: it's a most enjoyable read.

WAPO foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius has turned out an anti-war spy thriller for liberals - and anyone else who likes heart-pounding adventure with a side of smarts. An Iranian nuclear scientist does a virtual walk-in and reports Iran is working on the nuclear trigger. Career CIA officer Harry Pappas soon is in a race against White House war fever to find out what this "Dr. Ali" is really saying. The Iranians are trying to build the bomb, but progress is oddly evasive.

Suffering deep guilt for not having warned off his now dead Marine son about the stupidity of the Iraq effort, Pappas uses a back-channel to hook up with the Brits for access to their agents inside Iran. Or rather he hooks up with a particular Brit who Pappas worked with in the past. Pappas soon finds himself in the inevitable hall of mirrors where the question of who is doing what for whom always has two or three plausible answers.

The Brits mobilize a special unit called The Increment to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Dr. Ali - by penetrating Iran with a 3-person team. The members of the Increment have the `00' license-to-kill and they need it. Besides Iranian security, they are also up against an opponent who lives and kills in the shadows.

Ignatius also plays out a large part of the book inside Iran, which is interesting in its own right due to the relative lack of information in the US about life in Iran. However, the motivations of the Iranian scientist could be more fully and plausibly developed.

Ignatius strains credulity at times, but one suspects he intends to do so. The Increment backmatter touts echoes of Graham Greene and John Le Carre`, I would add Ian Fleming to that list. A satisfying read for fans of the spy thriller genre.

A young Iranian scientist, working on his country's own Manhattan project decides, more or less out of the blue, that he'd rather be a traitor than continue with his life as a privileged and respected scientist. It's easy for Iranians to pass the CIA some of the most classified Iranian documents - they simply log into CIA's Web site and upload them. Or so this story goes. The evidence is exactly what some of the more bellicose US presidential advisers are looking for - the pretext to "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" as one of the more humor-gifted US presidential candidates used to joke - and, following the glorious freedom-spreading successes in Iraq, the US is poised to whack Iran into liberty, democracy and unrestricted rock & roll.

This is where Pappas, the head of the Iranian desk at the CIA comes to shine. He goes beyond his call of duty to prevent the upcoming war. It's not easy but Pappas is resourceful and determined and his British friends seem to be on his side even when they are really implementing someone else's private agenda.

A lot of the book is atmosphere as the author seems to attempt to inject a large dose of Euro-Middle Eastern sophistication and ambiguity into his work - and he makes sure that we are made aware of it. The Iran of this book, as the author himself admits, is a product of his imagination aided by some readings from sources such as 'The Lonely Planet' and the author's own 2-week recent stay in Tehran. It's the well-meaning CIA vs. the crazy warmongers prodding the president toward a new war and sometimes it feels like we are re-reading the newspaper and magazine articles of a few years ago. It's the British secret service, corrupt and corrupting. It's hundreds of pages of competently written prose where not much is happening but the stage is being set for a possible final confruntation which, consistent to the 'shades of gray' and Euro-Middle Eastern sophistication theme never really takes place. The Iranian traitor is afraid but he cries himself into staying a likable traitor and further helping the CIA to help the US destroy his country. The CIA chief has personal issues but he manages to stay clean even though he sometimes succumbs to the world stage ambiguities and he finds himself shaking hands with 'the terrorist'. The Brit agent is rotten to the core but he can be a good friend, the Arab businessman is sophisticated and nuanced beyond comprehension with more penumbras than Rembrandt could have ever dreamed, the Iranians other than the youthful traitor are all the simplistic cliches we read about in America's monthlies.

In the end, the story is unconvincing on more than one level. The Iranian traitor's motivation is way too thin to persuade. Since the author insists in portraying him as a 'good guy' who does it all out of high principles it's hard to understand the principles behind him offering his country's enemy a pretext to kill thousands of his fellow Iranians. The shadowy Arab puppet master, holding the MI5 in one pocket and the Iranian leadership in another is even less believable. The technology and the gadgets are laughable. Not replying to an email received on a Blackberry does NOT prevent the CIA or the NSA or even the phone company from knowing that the Blackberry was physically in London when the email was delivered. Satellites, even the secret ones, can NOT monitor an entire country continuously, allowing the CIA bosses to watch videos of past events anywhere - it would be a long explanation but the bottom line is that the CIA can't bypass the laws of physics. A device that can 'reprogram' microprocessors from a distance is not possible with today's technology and it's unlikely to be possible in 100 years. Oh, and the plugs for Fareed Zacharia's and Thomas Friedman's books are somewhat bizarre - the author's friends, I suppose - and they appear to be forced into the narration.

As far as spook thrillers go, the Increment does raise to the level of a passable airport book. The exotic locales and the author's apparent familiarity with the local topography and customs did keep me interested and did motivate me to finish the book, hoping for some unexpected and climactic finale. But, here I am, having read the last page and the author's afterword and... no climax.

It's three stars for the sometimes good research - gadgetry and technologies excluded - and for the author managing to produce a largely readable tome. I have little doubt that Mr. Ignatius is capable of much, much better. He should try harder.

At times, The Increment is exciting, but its flaws are frequent and in some cases bizarre (the obsessive detail given to the food and drink consumed by the characters, for example). Most frustrating is the dramatic overuse of unnecessary exposition that was at times insulting. So too were some of the characters, who were caricatures more than anything (the filandering British spy, the politically motivated CIA analyst). Mr. Ignatius has an eye for pacing and story that, one hopes, will be accompanied by tighter writing in the future.

"The Increment" started out so strong, the characters were so strong, the plot was crisp and the whole thing just felt right.

The plot centers around two characters - an Iranian nuclear scientist that is disillusioned with the Iranian regime. The other character is a veteran CIA chief - the head of the Iranian desk.

Like I said, the book starts out very strong. I was intrigued by the characters, the situation and the backstory of the two main characters.

By the end of the first page I was convinced I was reading a 5 star book.

But, the characters started to change. They started acting differently. For example, the head of the CIA is a retired Admiral. He comes off as a principled, with-it kind of leader who is just out of his element when he's not commanding a ship. Fine. Later on, he has multiple scenes in which he just plays with toy ships rather than making decisions. He goes from being a leader to being a little boy. Other characters make similar shifts.

So, for the 2nd 100 pages I had determined that this was probably a 4 star book. Good, but not great.

Throw in the goofy technology (you cannot power an electronic device through radio waves, folks, if we could your cell phone would never run out of power), the satellite system that literally takes dozens of photos of ALL of Iran, including dumpy little towns that aren't even on the map (we photograph every square inch all day long and we don't know what's going on?), and the skimpy treatment of the special unit that the book is named after and...

well, the book degenerated to a 3 star piece of pulp fiction. Nothing special. It's a good airplane ride read.

THE INCREMENT takes a significant time to get into. The premise is interesting with a nuclear scientist providing information to the CIA that they must then in turn confirm and track down the anonymous informant. The beginning of this book contains a lot of traveling between countries and meeting people, which is exactly what slows the book down. I can't even remember how many times the main American character, Pappas, globe trotted to the UK and back to the USA before they even gained enough information to move in to Iran. "The Increment" (the equivilent of the MI6 double-O agents) does not even get introduced until near halfway through the story.

About halfway through the book the pace really picks up and the story becomes much more interesting and enjoyable. If it weren't for the slow start, this would be a wonderful book. I am inspired to now pick up BODY OF LIES, by the same author because I do think the prose is well conceived and executed (except for the pacing).

Overall, not a bad read; however, I would have rather spent time reading even the weakest of Ian Fleming James Bond books.

Good reading,

J.Stoner

The crux of this story is the Iranian Nuclear program, and the Big Question: Do they or don't they? A young Iranian scientist sends an oblique message to the CIA, who have to figure out if the guy is for real, or just a red herring by the Iranian powers that be. The CIA's head of the Iran desk, Harry Pappas, feels a sense of responsibilty toward the unknown person, as well as a fear of possible war, having lost his only son to Iraq. Getting no support from his own, he pulls in favors from London, resulting in the deployment of the eponymous Increment, a black-ops group that MI-5 keeps stashed back for just such events. Will the Increment be able to retrieve the Iranian scientist? That is the general plot of the book.

The look into the intricacies of nuclear weaponry is informative and interesting; I feel more educated and informed, in a Tom Clancy submarine sort of way, but there are just not any characters that I felt invested in. I'm a character-driven reader, and so for me, this was an interesting read, not a waste of time, but I would not look for this author again. If someone gave me a book by him, I'd stash it in my back-up stock, and save it for hard times.

"The Increment" is the first Ignatius book I read (I did not read Body of Lies, only saw the movie). However, it will definitely not be my last. The book kept me interested and wanting to continue throughout. Ignatius seems to have the perfect balance (better than any other writer in the technothriller genre) of action, character development, political intrigue, turmoil, gadgets, etc. The book is also meant to be very realistic, so it is not the "Yeah America" type of this book, nor is it the Hollywood-style book where there's a perfectly happy ending. (I won't go into details so I don't spoil the book for future readers). Ignatius did an incredible amount of research into everything described in the book, and it shows throughout the book.
I'm hard-pressed to find anything to critique about the book, but if I had to, I would say that the author doesn't always explain things discussed/referenced in the book. I generally prefer this style over the usual which is to assume the reader knows nothing. However, references to various obscure things (e.g. the "Horizons course") would have been appreciated.

But overall, I must say that the Increment is probably the best technothriller I have ever read, and I highly recommend it.

David Ignatius is one smart dude. Chief foreign affairs guru for The Washington Post, pundit, and novelist, Ignatius writes some of the best prose that can be found today about our complex world and America's place in it.

"The Increment," Ignatius's latest novel, drops the reader deep inside the notorious Iranian nuclear program and the even more notorious upper echelons of the CIA. An Iranian nuclear scientist anonymously sends what looks like explosive data to the CIA demonstrating that Iran is, contrary to all agreements and consciences, working on a nuclear weapon. This is the stuff that certain members of the Washington intelligence community and the White House desperately want - they want to go to war with Iran.

Fortunately, the information crosses the desk of Mr. Pappas, an American intelligence man of Greek descent. Struggling with the crushing guilt of having lost his son, an all-American boy if there ever was one, to a road-side bomb in Iraq, Pappas cannot sit idly by and watch the nation get led into another idiotic war.

But Pappas is shut out of the halls of power in the U.S. by his enemies in the intelligence community who know how to tell the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue what he wants to hear. So Pappas reaches out to the only lifeline he's got - a British intelligence officer whom he trusts. And that officer puts Pappas together with The Increment, a band of modern-day 007s, who have Bond's license to kill but none of his panache. These are killers, tried and true. And Pappas is going to use them to make contact with this Iranian scientist so he can stop a war.

The "thriller" aspects of this book seem a bit cliched - Ignatius breaks no new ground here. What makes the book special are Ignatius's compelling description of life in modern-day Iran and his colossal cynicism. This is a book where very few people are trustworthy, and those who are can be marginalized and discarded at a moment's notice.

All in all, a worthy book that captures much of the zeitgeist of our dangerous, desperate world.

Without going into depth about the plot, The Increment is the story of the trials and tribulations that Harry Pappas, a seasoned vet within the CIA, encounters when he receives secret information about the Iranian nuclear bomb program from an Iranian scientist. It becomes up to Pappas to decide if this information is real and what to do about it, since he is afraid that the current administration will go off "half-cocked" and start a war with Iran with the limited information in hand. Ultimately, Pappas turns to a British secret spy team known as "The Increment" to rescue the scientist from Iran so that more detailed information could be evaluated. In telling this tale, Ignatius has created an intelligent, complex spy story with real, mutli-dimensional characters. However, the plot moves along too slowly for my taste without any real excitement and thus I, at times, found myself skimming parts of the last 100 pages or so to find out how it ends. Further, while the main character, Harry Pappas, is well-developed, Ignatius uses Pappas too much as a vehicle to preach on his own (apparent) basic anti-war viewpoint and of his belief that there is a "rush to war" sentiment among key segments within the Washington establishment. All in all, Ignatius's strengths in providing rich characerizations, decent research and in describing the various locales within which the plot takes place enabled The Increment to be a decent read for me -- but not one that kept me glued to my seat. Given that The Increment is advertised as a spy thriller, I was expecting to be thrilled more often and more intensely than occurred. While I don't think The Increment will be a big favorite of the average spy thriller reader, I do think it will highly satisfy many readers of John Le Carre's, Graham Green's and Alan Furst's books.