Book Review: The Deceiver, by Frederick Forsyth

As the Cold War drew to a close many a thriller writer sensed that both the Cold War and the spy story which so flourished on the strength of its tensions, had more past than future--and cast their gaze backward rather than forward as they told stories of that past. So did it go with John le Carré's recounting of the career of "Ned" in 1990's The Secret Pilgrim (this stress on past, perhaps, why in this book George Smiley put in his only appearance in le Carré's novels in the four decade span between Smiley's People and the similarly backward-looking A Legacy of Spies). So did it also go with Frederick Forsyth's novel of the following year, The Deceiver--like Pilgrim a "novel" comprised of a succession of episodes out of its protagonist's career in Britain's Secret Service that recalled for me that classic structuring of a spy novel in such a manner, W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden.

As those who know these three authors would guess, le Carré's is the more Ashenden-like. After all, in contrast with Maugham and le Carré Forsyth is a plain and simple thriller writer, such that where they tended to use the usually banal and often morally ambiguous realities of espionage as the context of the human drama that was their principal interest, with Forsyth espionage, or at least that version of espionage suited to thrillers, was the interest of the story, with Forsyth distinguishing himself with "big picture" views of the game and attention to its mechanics as he worked out his often sprawling plots in detail in that fashion I have been prone to describe as "the security state epic." There is, too, the reality that Forsyth, unlike his colleagues Maugham and le Carré, is an old Tory who has never been shy about beating the reader over the head with his politics, lionizes Britain's secret services throughout for what he presents as their unmatched cunning, efficiency and ruthlessness in a struggle against enemies (the Soviets, the Irish Republican Army, etc.) he treats as villains in black and white and even stereotyped terms, with wrestling with life's complexities not to be found here, even when they stare us in the face. (Thus can Forsyth in the same tale both be smug about Britain's being much more democratic than some countries, but also how, in the face of a threat to "national security," said democracy will "make exceptions," without seeming aware of any possible dissonances.) Indeed, the form in which Forsyth presents the stories is a hearing by senior security state functionaries to determine whether the day of men like the titular "deceiver," Sam McCready, head of the desk of "Deception, Disinformation and Psychological Operations," is over and the time come to him put him out to pasture, giving McCready's deputy the chance to make his case for why not on the basis of his past triumphs--with no one likely to be in any doubt about what Forsyth's answer to that question will be (and not very much more doubt about what those conducting the hearing are going to decide in the end, given that, admiring of "the Establishment" as Forsyth is, this is one where the "brilliant maverick" is up against "stupid bureaucrats" in a time when budgetary axes are falling). Additionally, in contrast with the numerous small episodes Maugham and le Carré used in their books here Forsyth presents just four episodes, each a novella rather than a short story, and all from the latter part of McCready's tenure at said desk (1983 to 1991), rather than McCready's whole career.

How does it all read? As it happens, Forsyth's novellas, because of their smaller size having less room for the sweep and intricacy that was his hallmark, deprive him of the chance to do what made his books stand out. Along with Forsyth's decision to keep things grounded (there are no Devil's Alternative-type extravagances here)—this may have worked against his plots from rising above standard spy stuff (Is that Soviet defector leveling with us? How do we stop that arms shipment to that terrorist group?) in the essentials of the premises and their working out. As compared with his prior The Negotiator there is also less sense of Forsyth trying to do "something different," the Maugham-like touch in most cases just a twist toward the end, often a relatively minor one that--as was not the case with Maugham--consistently sees the irony come down on the head of someone other than the unfailingly masterly McCready (the Cousins across the Pond who failed to heed the advice of their wise British counterparts, or those that a McCready has been prepared to, in line with the aforementioned ruthlessness, use and then throw away). And if Forsyth has the ability to make a story whose ending we know suspenseful (everyone likely to be reading the book back when it came out knew that Charles de Gaulle did not die in 1963, but he kept many a reader turning the pages all the way down to the end of The Day of the Jackal), the fact that we all know in advance that the stories ended in the kind of triumph for McCready that his advocate will use to justify his job in the face of a presumably hostile officialdom works against any such effect. The result is that altogether two of the four novellas are essentially workman-like Cold War tales. Of the other two one is helped by the book's only really successful Ashenden-ish bit of drama (concerning one of McCready's exploits turning on the delusions of a middle-aged man with an unhappy home life's love for a prostitute and its tragic end for both), the other in its still very late into the narrative reading like a Death in Paradise episode complete with an unpersonable veteran detective from the London Metropolitan Police packed off to the Caribbean for the first time and not much liking the experience holding center stage for most of a story that takes its time bringing McCready into events, and unearthing more than ordinary criminal motivations behind the murder of a high-profile individual. (Indeed, our not so intrepid detective finds himself still wondering fairly late in the game if it was not after all a wife fed up with her husband's adulteries who "did it." It isn't much of a spoiler to say that it wasn't anything so simple, for why else would McCready's deputy be telling the tale right now?)

Altogether the result is that the individual novels only rarely rise above the ordinary, while the grouping of the novellas together does not make them more than the sum of its parts to anything like the degree we saw in Ashenden and The Secret Pilgrim (on the whole the kind of richer works that can only come from a more nuanced view than Forsyth offers here), while the effort is not helped by how rather than making an epic out of McCready's long career, his limiting the selection of episodes to incidents from his later years in his very senior position, and for that matter, their being so self-contained that one could read each of them quite separately without enjoying them the less. (Indeed, one might imagine that after Forsyth's earlier short story collection No Comebacks failed to become a blockbuster on par with his novels--short story collections generally don't, even when by as big a name as a Forsyth--he found himself producing shorter material, but was careful to tie them together to produce at least the semblance of a novel for marketing purposes.) Still, even where Forsyth's work here is run-of-the-mill in premise and incident and the structure of the whole is not all that it might be, the individual pieces remain competent nonetheless, benefiting from his clean, crisp, straightforward prose, his usual brisk pacing, and his careful usage of "the details" of the activities and scenes he describes (which, I imagine, had at least a few of his readers checking the map for the location of a certain Caribbean archipelago and then being surprised to find that it didn't actually exist). The result is that if I would not rank The Deceiver with Forsyth's best I still found it a diverting enough read--all as it also has the intrinsic interest of capping off the Cold War phase of the career of one of the last really significant innovators and truly Big Names the field ever produced.