The Company
by Robert Littell
Overlook Press/$28.95 At first glance and 894 pages, the latest novel by acclaimed espionage/thriller author Robert Littell can seem more than a bit daunting. A perusal of the jacket summary won't do much to put lazy or pedestrian readers at ease — The Company's story sprawls across nearly four decades, following the history of the Central Intelligence Agency from its post-World War II origins through the Cold War, to the breakup of the Soviet Union and beyond. Sounds like the vast, dry and detail-obsessive kind of thing only historical fiction buffs or conspiracy freaks could get into, right?
But by focusing on a handful of fully fleshed characters and hugely pivotal CIA operations, Littell manages to spin a tale that's both intriguing and emotionally compelling. Rather than using Russo-American tensions as a mere backdrop for character development, or even worse, sketching two-dimensional characters just so there's somebody around to do the cool spy shit, The Company deftly balances environment and interaction. It also balances perspective, lending the points of view of several memorable antiheroes (i.e. , "the Commies") as much weight as those of the patriots.
Opening with the unexplained assassination of the Pope in 1978, the story immediately shifts back to 1950 Berlin and into a game of cat-and-mouse between CIA operatives and a high-ranking KGB controller known as Starik. It races through the Cold War years, pausing to detail climaxes such as the Hungarian student revolt of 1956, the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Afghan civil war. Throughout, the main players age, gain insight and try to build some semblance of a life in the shadow of national security; represented largely as idealistic people repeatedly faced with decisions no one should ever have to make, they remain refreshingly human.
A couple of plot points push the envelope of credibility, particularly those used to keep the number of characters at a manageable size, in the game and emotionally involved for the novel's duration. But Littell's taut, provocative prose sucks the reader into the story and the characters themselves more than hold one's attention. As historical fiction, The Company is low on 007-style gadgetry, but high on action, slow-burn tension and a largely unwavering sense of reality. Best of all, it's also populated by several of that rarest type of character — the one about which readers find themselves, almost effortlessly, caring.
—Scott Harrell
This article appears in Jun 26 – Jul 2, 2002.
