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Robert Littell creates a multigenerational, wickedly nostalgic saga of the ClA - "The Company" to insiders. The fictional and historical characters of Robert Littell's novel reveal much of the nearly fifty years of this complex and powerful organization. At the heart is a mole hunt involving the CIA, M16, KGB, and Mossad - a stunningly conceived trip down the rabbit hole to the labyrinthine Alice-in-Wonderland world of espionage, a "wood where things have no names."
Racing across a landscape spanning the legendary Berlin Base of the '50s - the front line of the simmering Cold War Soviet invasion of Hungary, the Bay of Pigs, Afghanistan, and the Gorbachev putsch, The Company tells the thrilling story of agents imprisoned in double lives, fighting an enemy that is amoral, elusive, formidable.
Littell also lays bare the internecine warfare within The Company itself, adding another dimension to the spy vs. spy game. An atmosphere of distrust pits the counter-intelligence agents behind the desks in Washington, like the utterly obsessive real-life mole hunter James Jesus Angleton, against the covert action boys in the field, like The Company's Harvey Torriti - The Sorcerer - a brilliant and brash rules breaker, and his Apprentice, Jack McAuliffe, recruited fresh out of Yale, who learns both tradecraft and the hard truths of life in the field.
As this dazzling anatomy of the CIA unfolds, nothing less than the future is at stake. And the future is often only the day after tomorrow. At once a celebration of a long Cold War well fought and an elegy for the end of an era.
| Price | Condition | Delivery | Seller | Action |
| $99.99 | Digital |
| WonderClub |
William Tyus
reviewed Company: A Novel of the CIA on November 01, 2012
Company: A Novel of the CIA
Back when I was in middle school, I would have given my left nut to be James Bond (as portrayed by Sean Connery, not Roger Moore). I read all the books (they were a link from reading comics to reading actual books without pictures) and watched all the movies about a half dozen times each. The lure of being a super spy was great. I even remember reading that the CIA used to show James Bond films as part of their training.
The CIA's version of Bond, as rendered here (code name: Sorcerer), was an overweight alcoholic who played opera full blast in his office just in case the Commies were trying to listen in on his conversations, so any illusions I might still have about Bondian spycraft (drinking martinis, shagging supermodel villainesses, driving sports cars, fighting lethal hat throwing henchman) have now officially evaporated.
This James Michner-like tome charts the history of the CIA from their early days in Berlin up until the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years. The CIA went from a unit who did intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence to covertly trying to topple regimes.
The book can be a load at times, but some of the early set pieces work well, specifically the ones dedicated to the Hungarian's attempted overthrow of Communism in 1956 and the CIA's covert overt Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961. If true, the way they tried to kill Castro is laughable.* Beyond that featured point in Agency history, this colossus of a book has a tendency to get repetitive - CIA agent in danger/captured, let's get him out. Didn't this happen 250 pages ago? Why yes, Jeff, yes it did.
Littell populates his tale with historical figures and gamely tries to bring the past to life ("So Joe, how was Young Frankenstein?" Or "They made love while listening to new pop music sensation Madonna singing her current hit, "Like a Virgin""). Yeesh! JFK and his brother Bobby (hubris) and especially Ronald Reagan (doddering) come off poorly, as rendered here. The character that livens up the book each and every time he appears is the above mentioned Sorcerer. The fat man has moxie.
If you like spy novels or historical fiction, I would say give it a go.
*Bayer aspirin dosed with quick killing bacteria.
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