The Spy Book

My current reading of The Deerslayer has turned my attention to works by Cooper that I've read already, a couple of which I haven't reviewed here before now. Published in 1821, The Spy was only Cooper's second novel, and the first to be much a literary success; set mainly during the Revolutionary War (in 1780, to be exact --Cooper himself was born in 1789), it also marked his first foray into historical fiction. It's very much the production of a fledgling writer still developing his craft; it doesn't have even as much technical proficiency as The Last of the Mohicans (1826), nor as matured a moral sensibility in some areas. I've read it twice (the first time was as a kid), but that's primarily because, when I was homeschooling our daughters, I felt that my memory of it needed a refresher.

Set in Cooper's native state of New York, the subtitle of this book is "A Tale of the Neutral Ground." The area referred to is the "no man's land" between New York City and its immediate environs, held by the British, and the American positions further up the Hudson, where they held their line defending the approaches to Albany. Villagers and landowners between the two might be exposed to the raiding parties of both sides --neither of whom were always scrupulous about respecting civilian life and property-- and to collateral damage in any battles between elements of the two armies. Not surprisingly, it was also a hotbed for guerillas and spies. Loyalties in the area were mixed; of all the thirteen colonies, New York had the highest proportion of Loyalists, or Tories (and was actually the only one of the thirteen to furnish more men for the British army than for the American one!). All of these conditions are faithfully reflected in the novel.

Our protagonist here is young landowner Harvey Birch, a secretive fellow without a family, whose farm suffers much neglect in the course of his mysterious comings and goings. He's generally thought by his neighbors to be a spy --the question is, for which side? (And Cooper will enlighten us on that score only in his own good time.) But we're also soon introduced to his wealthy Tory neighbors, the Whartons, who early on welcome the family's heir, Captain Henry Wharton of the British Army, who's visiting them in disguise. (He's genuinely NOT a spy --but the fact that he's out of uniform could get him hanged as one, if he happens to be captured by the Americans.) In the course of the book, we also meet George Washington (whom Cooper portrays as more involved in hands-on intelligence gathering, and more prone to travel around in disguise, than he probably actually was). Some other engaging characters populate the novel as well, and the author does deliver a plot with considerable action and intrigue. Also on the positive side, he does not demonize the British and their sympathizers; one despicable villain here is British, but he earns the contempt of the other Brits, to their credit, and the American guerillas in the area don't earn any plaudits for good behavior, either.

Cooper's style here is typical of the Romantic school of that day; his syntax is often convoluted, he's got a big vocabulary that includes plenty of long words that he's not afraid of using, and he has a very deliberate mode of storytelling. But I don't consider any of these aspects of early 19th-century diction to be faults as such, and I actually didn't think the dialogue was as unrealistically ornate as it sometimes becomes in The Last of the Mohicans (the latter was actually the only Cooper work I've read so far where I had a real problem with the style). There are no real moral conflicts or choices here that face the characters and cause them to grow. Despite the opportunities for dialogue between the partisans of popular democracy and of aristocratic monarchy, these are mostly ignored; this is not really a novel that explores the ideology of the American Revolution. Readers should be warned that tragic events are a staple of Romantic fiction; and the final chapter, which is projected 33 years into the characters' future, during the War of 1812, to tell us what became of several of them, relies implausibly on a lot of coincidence, and could better have been left out, IMO. Racial insensitivity towards blacks also mars this work; Harvey uses the n-word, and while Cooper's treatment of Mr. Wharton's slave Caesar is in the main positive and sympathetic, he couldn't resist "humorously" implying that a fall on his head couldn't hurt him much. (The humor doesn't succeed, to put it mildly.) By 1826, the author's recognition of non-whites as equal parts of the human race had advanced significantly; but at this point, he still had quite a ways to go.

For readers interested in the fiction of this period, or in Cooper's work in general. this novel is worth reading; and it's not without its rewards in its own right. But it doesn't deserve more than three stars in my estimation, and I wouldn't suggest it as a first introduction to Cooper's novels.