Customer Reviews

Vienna Assignment

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The Vienna Assignment is the third in the series of crime / espionage novels involving a group of Militiamen in an un-named Soviet bloc country. This time round Steinhauer has chosen to focus on Brano Sev, the most unattractive member of the group. In fact Sev is a security policeman and he is the archetypal secret agent - deceitful, manipulative and paranoid. The story is a very complicated one with constantly shifting allegiances and conspiracies. Everyone is spying on everyone else and no one is who they seem. As the anti-hero is such a thoroughly awful character, the most interesting parts of the book are the twisted mind games he plays as he struggles to survive a violent chain of Cold War bluff, counter-bluff, set-up and betrayal. The disturbing pictures from inside the head of this cold-blooded killer are most revealing of the constant insecurity and fear that was life for ordinary people behind the Iron Curtain. This dark reality lingers long after the plotline is forgotten.

I'm a fan of Olen Steinhauer but this isn't my favorite of his books. It's certainly got an intricate and original plot which laid out from the perspective of a circa-1966 East European (Communist) espionage agent. My biggest problem with the book is its very opaqueness. The author constructs a very elaborate series of actions (assassinations of agents, frame ups, betrayals, etc.) with no explanation or logic or even many clues for the reader. I think that this approach has its benefits, but at some point, the hidden hand becomes a frustration and stops being entertaining. On top of that, the protagonist of the "The Vienna Assignment", is not a particularly likable or even interesting character, so readers don't even have that to hang on to as they wander through the book's murky labyrinth. One other source of irritation for me was the author's choice to make the central character's point of origin a fictional country in the Communist Bloc. International relationships did (and do) have meaning and account for behavior, so the removal of the that "political compass" detracted from the story (my opinion, of course).

The novel does finally have a reasonably satisfying ending, but overall, there are more interesting Steinhauer stories out there.