Review by New York Times Review
HEROES IN ESPIONAGE fiction tend to fall into two categories: the world-weary professional and the rank amateur. Milo Weaver the killer-spook of Olen Steinhauer's "The Tourist," and John le Carre's MI6 agent George Smiley are cynical veterans of the spying game, old hands at duplicity and betrayal. At the other end of the spectrum is the mild-mannered engineer of John Buchan's "The Thirty-Nine Steps," Richard Hannay, who stumbles across a German spy ring and finds himself framed for murder. In Joseph Kanon's "Leaving Berlin," another novice takes center stage. Kanon, the author of the Edgar Award-winning "Istanbul Passage," sets this engaging thriller in 1949. The Berlin airlift is underway, and Soviet and Western spies circle one another in the ruins of the defeated Nazis' capital, recruiting informants and jousting for advantage. Into this fraught environment tumbles Alex Meier, a German Jewish socialist who escaped to Los Angeles before the Holocaust and made a name for himself as a novelist. Swept up by the Red Scare, Meier refused to name names before a Congressional committee, a principled decision that has cost him his marriage, cut him off from his 10-year-old son and turned him from celebrity author into a pariah facing jail or deportation. Making a desperate deal with the Central Intelligence Agency, Meier has returned to Berlin, posing as a disenchanted exile. If he can deliver valuable information about Soviet intentions and recruit agents to the cause, he'll get a second chance in America. But, of course, things don't go according to plan. After checking into the partially burned-out Hotel Adlon near the Brandenburg Gate, Meier crosses to the American sector for his first meeting with his handler. "It's Dodge City here," the man warns him. "You want to watch your back. Everywhere. The sectors don't mean anything. They think it's all theirs. People disappear. ... People get killed too." Not long thereafter, East German agents who have been tailing him try to wrestle Meier into their car. A gunfight breaks out, leaving one assailant dead and the C.I.A. man mortally wounded. Dying, he urges Meier to finish off the surviving attacker. "Take the gun. No witnesses." Overcoming his revulsion, Meier shoots the East German at point-blank range. This killing propels Meier into a treacherous pas de deux in which he must satisfy the demands of his C.I.A. sponsors while staying one step ahead of the Communist investigators on his trail. His initial assignment - rekindling a romance with his first love, Irene von Bernuth, the survivor of a gang rape by Russian troops who has become the mistress of a Soviet State Security operative - makes his position even more precarious. Meier falls for her again, and after her desperately ill brother escapes from a slave labor camp run by the Soviets in eastern Germany, they must hide him while trying to engineer his flight to the West. Irene's brother has been mining uranium for the Soviet nuclear program, working under terrible conditions, and Meier calculates that if he can get this story on the air the United States will score a huge propaganda victory. Meier will thus have fulfilled his duty and be able to go home. But then, in rapid succession, come another murder, the disposal of a corpse in the River Spree, a Party purge in the Kulturbund and the threat of betrayal by a mole in the American spy circle. Kanon populates the blasted landscape of Berlin, in which the Third Reich has been replaced by yet another odious regime, with a gallery of corrupted characters. Irene's sister, married to an unrepentant Nazi doctor who worked for the Third Reich's euthanasia program, insists that her husband was only doing what was legal at the time. ("He's a good man. A wonderful father.") Markovsky, the Soviet spymaster sleeping with Irene, represents the thuggish new order. "Fleshy, but not fat, blunt hands," Meier observes at a Kulturbund event. "A wife in Moscow. Trying to be pleasant, not an occupier. ... Holding Irene's arm in his, her protector. What had it been like, at the mercy of the Russians? Frau, komme. Sometimes several in one night, gangs of them." There are a few walk-ons by Bertolt Brecht, who has returned from exile and become a willing tool in the Communist propaganda machine. As Kanon portrays him, Brecht is a cigar-chomping rationalizer, willing to turn a blind eye to Soviet abuses if it will help him gain audiences for his plays. "Sometimes you have to work with things as they are," he tells Meier, justifying his decision to participate in a radio interview denouncing capitalism. "Look at the church, the real one. All those crimes, so many years, and yet there's the music. The art. We're not priests, we're artists. We accommodate. We survive." Kanon deftly captures the ambience of a city that's still a wasteland almost four years after the Nazis' defeat: "Standing walls were pockmarked by shelling, marooned in empty spaces where buildings had collapsed and been hauled away, holes now for the wind to rush through. ... Even the smell of bombing, the burned wood and the sour lime of broken cement was still in the air." At Alexanderplatz, once the heart of the capital, Meier "could make out ... the dark hulk of the palace, singed with soot, the dome just a steel frame, but still standing, the last Hohenzollern. Across from it the cathedral was a blackened shell. ... Unter den Linden was dark, the lindens themselves scorched clumps." KANON'S DIALOGUE sometimes verges on Cold War noir parody, and a few of his plot twists seem contrived. Meier's near-overnight transformation from naïf to superspy, flawlessly anticipating the moves of his antagonists, is a bit hard to swallow. And it took me three readings of the denouement - a complicated operation involving a vanished corpse, an American double agent, a German intelligence officer and a tense dash across Berlin - before I fully grasped what was happening. Still, Kanon keeps the story humming along, enriching the main narrative with vignettes that heighten the atmosphere of duplicity and distrust. Toward the end, Meier spots the wife of a fellow member of the Kulturbund, an architect who has been threatened with imprisonment for lack of Party loyalty, huddling with a German intelligence officer, trading information for her husband's freedom. "A small price, except you keep paying. Coffee every week, powdered milk, and little betrayals, the neighborhood, the Kulturbund, Herb's architect friends, all overheard now," he observes. "It was just the way things were. ... This was the future." It's merely one of many powerful images of a city that has traded its murderous past for a brutish new reality - and of the moral compromises engaged in by its citizens simply to survive. 'It's Dodge City here,' one agent warns. 'You want to watch your back.' JOSHUA HAMMER is the author of three nonfiction books. His next, "The Rescue: One Man's Race Against Al Qaeda to Save the Treasures of Timbuktu," will be published in 2016.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 29, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Setting his latest novel in the postwar Berlin he portrayed so effectively in The Good German (2001), Kanon again focuses on a returnee to the now-divided city who is searching for a lost lover. German Jew Alex Meier, a celebrated novelist in America, has opted to live in East Berlin after having defied Joe McCarthy and his witch-hunters. German communists treat Meier's arrival as a publicity coup, unaware that the writer's motivation is purely personal. Hoping to have his name cleared in the U.S., he has agreed to spy on the East Germans, not knowing that his first assignment will involve extracting information from the woman he loves. For a writerly type, Meier picks up his spycraft quickly, and, soon enough, double agents and dead bodies are swirling about him like moths to the flame. Kanon, like Alan Furst, has found a landscape and made it his own. In fact, the two writers make outstanding bookends in any collection of WWII fiction, Furst bringing Paris just before and during the war to vivid life, and Kanon doing the same for Berlin in its aftermath. A quibble or two, maybe, with the slightly overwrought ending, but there's far too much to like in this fine mix of espionage and history to worry over it. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Istanbul Passage (2012) boosted Kanon onto several best-seller lists, giving his publisher plenty of reason to give his latest a hefty shove in the same direction.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his new novel, Kanon (Istanbul Passage) stays firmly in his traditional milieu-intrigue in post-World War II Europe-with this solid story about a German emigre, Alex Meier, returning to the divided city of East Berlin in 1949. It's not an entirely voluntary return for Meier, a successful novelist who had been working in Hollywood: a refusal to testify about Communists before Congress results in the forced repatriation; if he wants to return to the States, he must become a spy. The book is full of real-life historical figures, mostly writers like Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Zweig, and Ruth Berlau who are, like the fictional Meier, warmly welcomed home by the Communists. Meier's assignment is to spy on the cultural apparatus of East Germany and, in particular, to investigate a state security bigwig, Major General Maltsev, the consort of Elspeth von Bernuth, one of his childhood friends. There's a fair amount of action, including a shootout in a dark street that results in a shocking act of violence, but the appeal of the book is how it conjures the atmosphere of post-War Europe, in the vein of Alan Furst and David Downing. There's too much backstory and the period details sometimes bog down the narrative, but once all the pieces are in place the story hits its stride. Kanon likes to wrestle with the moral dimensions of spying (a la le Carré)-and what's more, he's very good at it. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM Partners. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. In his seventh thriller, Kanon (Istanbul Passage) turns to postwar Berlin and in particular to the Soviet sector during the difficult months of the blockade (1948-49). Noted author Alex Meier fled Germany for the United States when the Nazis began persecuting Jews. Now, he has been invited back, along with other renowned authors, as culture becomes part of the cold war between East and West. But Alex's situation is precarious. He was actually forced to leave America (and his young son) owing to his intransigence when facing the congressional witch hunt for communists. Recruited as a spy with the promise of exoneration, Alex soon finds himself dealing with issues of trust and his own survival as the East German secret police force him to become an informer. Kanon's evocation of Berlin in ruins is masterly, but his most striking trait is his depiction of characters under stress, not only Alex but all those he must entangle, including family members who survived the war. VERDICT A pleasure from start to finish, blending literary finesse with action, this atmospheric historical thriller will appeal not only to Kanon's many fans but to those who enjoy Alan Furst, Philip Kerr, and other masters of wartime and postwar espionage fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 9/8/14.]-Ron Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Set in 1949, a few years after Kanon's The Good German (2001), this novel explores the grave moral complexities of life in Soviet-controlled East Berlin through the tense encounters of Alex Meier, a young Jewish novelist of some renown working for the CIA.A native of Berlin, Alex fled the Nazis for America before World War II. When his leftist politics got him in trouble in the U.S., costing him his marriage, he struck a deal to go back to Germany as an undercover spy with the promise that he could return to America with his record cleared. His cover story is that he missed his homeland, like other returning intellectuals including Bertolt Brecht (a minor character in the book). In fact, he has greatly missed Irene, the woman he left behind, whose romantic involvement with a Russian makes her one of his targets. Like everything else in the wreckage of the blockaded city, where going for a walk through the park attracts suspicion, his reunion with her is fraught with dangerespecially after her ailing brother shows up, having escaped a Russian labor camp. The novel has its share of abductions and killings, one of which leaves Alex in the classic role of odd man out. Following his action-charged Istanbul Passage (2012), Kanon relies almost exclusively on dialogue to tell his story, which sometimes leaves the reader feeling as hemmed in as the Berliners. But the atmosphere is so rich, the characters so well-drawn and the subject so fascinating that that is a minor complaint. Another compelling, intellectually charged period piece by Kanon, who works in the shadows of fear as well as anyone now writing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
