Reviews for Company: A Novel of the CIA

The average rating for Company: A Novel of the CIA based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-23 00:00:00 Barbars Spittle "High over the city, a rack of clouds drifted across the hunter's moon…On a deserted avenue near a long wall, a dirty yellow Fiat mini-taxi cut its light and its motor and coasted to the curb at Port Angelica. A lean figure wearing the rough ankle-length cassock and hood of a Dominican friar emerged from the backseat. He had been raised in the toe of the boot of Italy and was known as the Calabrian by the shadowy organizations that from time to time employed his services…" - Robert Littell, The Company So opens Robert Littell's insanely ambitious, 896-page novel about the CIA. In Littell's precise, hyper-specific way, the date is Thursday, September 28, 1978. The Calabrian is in Rome, and he is making a late-night visit to Pope John Paul I. You know Pope John Paul I, right? He died of a heart attack just 33 days into his papacy. Or so we're told. In the alternate reality of The Company, the Pope actually fell victim to the Calabrian. Who the Calabrian is, who ordered the hit, and to what end, is a "mystery" that will not be resolved for another 600 or so pages. That does not really matter, though. The Company may begin with this interlude in Rome, but it does not end there. Indeed, the Calabrian and the Pope play a relatively small role in this massive undertaking, which seeks to give us a fictionalized history of the Central Intelligence Agency from the 1950s to the early 1990s. It's hard to know where to start with a book this big, this entertaining, this problematic. Thus, it helps to start at the beginning, especially since this opening section gives us a good idea of what to expect in the pages to follow. It is shadowy and mysterious and parses out its clues in a restrained and careful manner. It sets up a long-game, at which Littell specializes, one that will eventually pay off but requires some patience beforehand. It is also a seamless and confident melding of historically accepted truth with fringe conspiracies that creates an entirely new reality that feels real, since all the puzzle pieces are suddenly snug, but which is decidedly not. (Conspiracists will love this, because in Littell's universe, there are no random occurrences; everything is controlled by a man, somewhere, hiding behind a curtain). This kind of conflation is endlessly entertaining, intellectually dangerous (a bit more on that below), and also thematically perfect, as it adds to the "wilderness of mirrors" aura that Littell successfully cultivates. Littell's novel follows a handful of characters, both American and Russian, as they fight the Cold War in the dark corners and blind alleys of the world. On the American side, we have the fictional Harvey "the Sorcerer" Torriti, Jack McAuliffe, Leo Kritzky, and Winstrom Ebbitt, as well as the real-life James Jesus Angleton. They are opposed by the Russian agent Yevgeni, who goes under deep cover in America (ala The Americans), and the all-powerful and mysterious Starik, who has a mole deep in the CIA, codenamed SASHA. (Unfortunately, Starik's most defined trait is his pedophilia, and we are treated to many, many sequences of him and his "nieces" in disgusting situations. This subplot, in which Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is used as a singularly blunt metaphor for spying, is both gratuitous and unnecessary). In terms of characterizations, the dramatis personae presents a very mixed bag. The best, by a wide margin, is Torriti, a fat, double-chinned alcoholic who is nevertheless eminently suited for his job. His introduction is quite memorable: The Sorcerer was dressed in the shapeless trousers and ankle-length rumpled green overcoat of an East German worker. The tips of a wide and flowery Italian tie were tucked, military style, between two buttons of his shirt. His thin hair was sweat-pasted onto his glistening skull. Eying his apprentice across the room, he began to wonder how Jack would perform in a crunch; he himself had barely made it through a small Midwestern community college and then had clawed his way up through the ranks to finish the war with the fool's gold oak leaves of a major pinned to the frayed collar of his faded khaki shirt, which left him with a low threshold of tolerance for the Harvard-Princeton-Yale crowd…Nobody in the Company bothered consulting the folks on the firing line when they press-ganged the Ivy League for recruits and came up with jokers like Jack McAuliffe, a Yalie so green behind the ears he'd forgotten to get his ashes hauled when he was sent to debrief Torriti's hookers the week the Sorcerer came down with the clap…Clutching a bottle of PX whiskey by the throat, closing one eye and squinting through the other, the Sorcerer painstakingly filled the kitchen tumbler to the brim. "Not the same without ice," he mumbled, belching as he carefully maneuvered his thick lips over the glass. He felt the alcohol scald the back of his throat. "No ice, no tinkle. No tinkle, schlecht!" Frankly, after Torriti, everyone else seems pretty much a cardboard cutout (I'm not using "cutout" in the espionage sense, either). Jack, the young Yalie who steadily rises up the ranks, is described mainly in terms of his "Cossack mustache," which is referenced enough to make it into a drinking game. He is the stereotypical hero who plays by his own rules. When told not to fall in love with a source, he immediately falls in love with a source. When told not to land on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs, he promptly lands on the beaches at the Bay of Pigs. When asked to explain the Cold War (and the characters, irritatingly, always refer to it as the Cold War, even early in the book, when the phrase probably wouldn't have been so widespread), Jack says: "It was about the good guys beating the bad guys." This is about as boring a sentiment as you can imagine, and leaves one wishing for the moral complexities of Le Carre (who Littell, through his characters, gently mocks). Littell does a fairly decent job with the real-life personages. Most of these are cameos, though some are quite brilliant, if not quite fair. This includes a sexually distracted John Kennedy, impossibly entwined with the Mob, and a clueless, dementia-addled Ronald Reagan, who keeps forgetting his own decisions. (The Company doesn't really have a political point of view, unless you count its soft anti-democratic leanings. In Littell's telling, foreign policy is better left to the intelligence men, rather than elected officials, a view at odds with both democracy, and the many failures of the CIA). Littell's fictionalized Angleton, the famed CIA mole hunter, is extremely well-crafted. Right up until the end, you are not sure whether he was an addled paranoiac, haunted by his onetime friend, the British spy Kim Philby, or whether Angleton was right all along about the extent to which the USSR had penetrated western democracies. (Interestingly, despite being exceedingly pro-CIA, it is the Russians who seem to get the better of the U.S. at every turn. While the American agents keep getting caught, the Russians go free. While American plots fizzle, the Russian plots explode. At the end, you will be almost surprised that the USSR fails, and the U.S. remains). The Company is wildly inconsistent, a testament to how much story it is trying to tell. The early scenes set in Germany, with Torriti and Jack playing their version of the "great game," are superb. In fact, they are the highlight of The Company. Try as it might, the book never recaptures the early magic it found in the noirish dividing line between East and West Berlin. After Berlin, The Company makes big jumps forward in time. There are satisfying set pieces aplenty, including the aforementioned plots to kill Castro, the Bay of Pigs, the Hungarian Revolution, and a surprisingly intense retelling of the attempted coup against Gorbachev by hard-line Communists in 1991. The temporal leaps are necessary, in order to get to all these momentous events. The downside, though, is that you lose the carefully modulated tension Littell meticulously builds. In a way, The Company is a series of rising and falling arcs. Once one arc is finished, Littell moves on and starts all over again. This can be a bit frustrating, and more than once, I found myself wishing that he had chosen one storyline and stuck with it. Of course, that would defeat Littell's Mailer-like attempt to swallow and digest the whole of the CIA. Another downside to Littell's ambition is that his initial characters, the ones that we become most familiar with, even if they are a bit flat (e.g., Jack), cannot remain in the same place. As time moves on, they get old, and they have to be replaced. The biggest loss is Torriti, who disappears for most of the novel, only turning up now and then. In rather simplistic fashion, Littell replaces an aging Jack and an aging Ebbitt with Jack's son, Anthony, and Ebbitt's son, Manny. It's saying something that Anthony and Manny are even less developed than their fathers. Littell is at ease with the spycraft. He is awkward to the point of being cringe-worthy when he attempts to flesh out the personal lives of his characters. When two men are talking about spying, the dialogue sings, especially at Littell ladles out the lingo, using great phrases such as "barium meals" and "walking back the cat" to describe the process of flushing out a rat. But when a man attempts to talk to a woman…Well, it's not good. You might ask, at this point: What about the women? Well, for the most part, women need not apply. Littell has a weird habit of introducing a potentially-interesting female character, one who is dynamic, capable, driven, and then forcing her on a short, dull journey to the middle. The main role for any woman in The Company is as a wet-blanket hausfrau, relegated to nagging her man about his devotion to the job, only to be put in her place by her man's patriotic blandishments. In terms of writing, Littell is no Le Carre. He is not a prose stylist or deep philosophical thinker. Rather, he is a plotter. The genius of The Company is how it takes the paranoia of Angleton and allows it to infuse every page. You do not know who is who or what is what. Is this character loyal or a turncoat? Is that a defector or a dispatched agent? Every single occurrence might be a genuine event, or it might be a ploy, or it might be a genuine event that is a ploy to make you think the genuine event is not genuine. The plot is an Escherian staircase; it expands and contracts, folds and unfolds, loops back on itself. There is a long con at play, interrupted by a series of shorter ones. At times, Littell loses the thread himself, and has to resort to the Mossad to cut the Gordian know (deus ex Israeli). For the most part, though, things pay off quite satisfyingly. At the start, I mentioned the blending of history with fiction. This is worth mentioning because Littell's third-person narrative is entirely self-assured. He describes made-up events with the same authority as he does the historical elements. He takes fragments, such as Kennedy's alleged mob connections, and uses them to build impressive edifices. In many respects, this really is an alt-history of the Cold War, with the conspiracy theory given prevalence at almost every turn. It's important to remind yourself: this is a novel. But what a novel! Strange as it sounds, the prodigious length of The Company actually helps dilute its many shortcomings. And Littell's insistence on keeping things moving forward, ever forward, never allows you time to consider quitting. That's saying something, too. That over the course of 900 pages, despite some terrible sex scenes, grating dialogue, and limp characters, I was always anxious to find out what happened next, even though, for the most part, because this is historical fiction, I already did.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-01 00:00:00 William Tyus 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.