Of Spies and Bureaucracy

Olen Steinhauer and Andrew Grant bring the spy novel to the modern era

Governments may use spies to maintain power through knowledge, but novelists use them to explore one of our most sinister yet alluring traits: betrayal.

Betrayal has been at the heart of great drama (think "Othello") and opera (anything by Verdi). In literature, betrayals between people and governments, duplicity between individuals and institutions, have inspired almost all novels of espionage. Two of our best current espionage novelists - Olen Steinhauer and Andrew Grant - have new novels that explore the nature of spying as a career.
The brutal battleground of tortured private and public morality is the métier for Olen Steinhauer, whose gripping "The Tourist" propelled him last year to the top of the spy-writing genre (Hollywood took notice - George Clooney optioned the book). It featured a hero - loosely speaking - in Milo Weaver, who is born with the baggage that many other modern fictional spies spend a series of books acquiring. To reveal more here would take away from the plot of the first novel (if you haven't read it yet, do), but let's just say that while Milo's loyalties lie on the side of the good guys, it's really hard to say who exactly they are.

Steinhauer's new novel, "The Nearest Exit," out this month, brings Milo back to work in a case - actually several related cases - that show how the personal really does become political. It starts with Milo being ordered to abduct and kill a young immigrant in Germany, then explodes outward from there. With Milo, Steinhauer has created a character who lives in a murky world of ambivalent morality, who wants somehow to be grounded in a sort of reality (he has a wife, and a daughter, in Brooklyn, N.Y.).
Milo is, at heart, a ruthless professional, and even as he weaves the strands of deception that define his work, he seeks to uncover the truth. Or what's left of it. Milo is modern - driven by the demands of country, job, family and the responsibility that comes from knowledge. In Steinhauer's interesting term, he's a Tourist, someone who works for an ultra-secret espionage branch of government, with only a few members, who are chosen for their ability to suppress aspects of their humanity. "The tourists think of themselves as so special that normal human philosophy could not explain away their position," Steinhauer says. In other words, they're spies of today.

Steinhauer himself is a student of the spy novel - he taught a course on it in Germany recently - and admires the works of John Le Carré, Len Deighton and Charles McCarry, who create worlds of intrigue and nebulous motivation compared to the more gung-ho type of spy thriller that remains popular.
Our culture has had a long fascination with espionage, dating back to the War of Independence, when Benedict Arnold switched sides out of resentment for what he thought were slights (sometimes spies arise out the most pathetic character traits) and, while still an American general, tried to surrender West Point to the British.

His name became a byword for traitor, but the broad outline of his story inspired James Fenimore Cooper to write about espionage in his second novel, 1821's "The Spy." That may have been perhaps the first American spy thriller, and while spies figured in our history over the next century (especially during the Civil War), the spy novel didn't take off as a genre until much later.

Our modern spy story emerged in the 20th century with the Ashenden tales of W. Somerset Maugham, who based them on his own work as a spy for the British government during World War I. What made Maugham's Ashenden stories so influential with subsequent generations of writers was the author's eye for the business of spy work. Not the exploits, but the bureaucracy that built a network of spies, and the kind of person who worked in the field. In other words, the spy as civil servant. Which meant that anyone - tinker, tailor, typist, novelist - could be a spy, that betrayal was always close at hand, that moral fluidity was part of the contemporary ethical landscape.

Novels that deal with the actual business of spying, flowing from Somerset Maugham to Graham Greene ("Our Man in Havana"), to John Le Carré ("Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy"), Len Deighton ("The Berlin Game"), Alan Furst ("The Spies of Warsaw") and several others speak to Steinhauer and Grant. In these works the writer explores the nature of commitment to the cause at hand, the moral quandaries involved in serving a higher good (if indeed that's the ultimate goal), the very essence of what it is to live a life where lying becomes second-hand, the illusion of knowledge that is traded for the illusion of power, an uncertain present and an indeterminate future.

"There's a certain lineage of spy novel, coming from the James Bond world," Steinhauer says, "where your main characters are these types that are ultra patriotic, or ultra something or other. I've never been able to abide by that. You're dealing with such a duplicitous world that to have certain types like that floating around in it just isn't realistic." So as Steinhauer wrote his characters, he developed a background for Milo that included one where lying became second nature. His profession, his behavior, flowed realistically from his upbringing.

The realism of the spy hero - albeit a fictional sort of realism - was what Andrew Grant was after when he was creating his David Trevellyan, who figured in Grant's debut novel, "Even," and is back with "Die Twice."

"Len Deighton really had an impact on me," Grant says. "Most of the things I'd read before that were pure escapism. Len Deighton gave his characters a real, domestic, ordinary mundane side. One minute the hero would be in East Berlin on a case, then he'd be back in England having a problem, with nothing to feed the kids for breakfast. You'd think: these guys are just like us but do a different job. That was one of the things that encouraged me to make the jump and become a writer," Grant says

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Grant wanted to write a series - he's a fan of series thrillers, where he can look forward to the next installment - but he wanted his hero to be able to be in a different city or situation, and thus the idea of having him work as an intelligence officer for the Royal Navy provided that freedom.

Trevellyan has the take-charge attitude of Jack Bauer from "24," with a more savage British wit and like Bauer, the realization that he must not only confront the bad guys, but also the bureaucracy. In other words, you've got a loyal subject who also realizes he's surrounded by idiots whose idiocy can be as treacherous as those of the traitors and villains he's supposed to be fighting. Readers "may be smiling at the situation from another viewpoint," Grant says, in other words: they can identify with bureaucracy in any form.

In "Die Twice," Trevellyan searches for a rogue British agent who is planning to sell a deadly gas to a terrorist organization. Naturally, British intelligence wants this all handled without fuss - and without help for their agent - so once again, Trevellyan needs to rely on his own sense of the moment. In the meantime, readers get such choice dialogue as this:

"What's the point? Ask no questions - hear no lies."
"A very laissez faire attitude."
I shrugged.
"Not really," I said. "Just practical. Allegiances shift. People move on. All I care about is finding the opportunities."

That is the crux of the sharp-witted spy novel of today: finding opportunities amid shifting allegiances, and dealing with the kind of myopic middle-management that so many modern spies (and readers of spy stories) confront.

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