Cold War spy tale from a former CIA officer

CHISTOPHER’S GHOSTS

By Charles McCarry

The Overlook Press, $25, 272 pages

REVIEWED BY STEVE HIRSCH

“Christopher’s Ghosts” is the latest in a series of often elegant novels that former CIA officer Charles McCarry has written about his fictional spy Paul Christopher, American intelligence and the Christopher clan.

This novel should find itself in many a briefcase and flight bag this summer.

Mr. McCarry succeeds because he has a real story to tell here, and he tells it well, taking the reader along a path with surprising twists and turns. It’s one that leads engagingly from Nazi Germany to the Cold War.

His characters are, in the main, believable and his evocation of place is solid and often superb.

The story Mr. McCarry has chosen to tell is of some of the formative events of the life of Paul Christopher, who we meet in 1939 as an adolescent, living in Berlin with his American father and beautiful German mother.

The Christophers are unapologetically a part of the American Establishment; they are New England WASPs of the sort who would tramp nobly at dawn through the mountains of rural Massachusetts for exercise and carry a watch that’s been in their family for three generations. The German side of Paul Christopher’s family is similar — stoic Prussian types with military bearings, representing the aristocracy of the Old World and its traditional values.

This is an important part of the book and of the way Mr. McCarry has chosen to weave his multivolume espionage tale. The world that Mr. McCarry has chosen to portray, and the world that Paul Christopher enters in the years after Berlin, is the world inhabited and created by the men who built American intelligence in the shambles left by World War II. These men were largely white, aristocratic, Ivy League types, a stereotype that has made for an easy target for other authors of spy novels.

However, Mr. McCarry has taken the opposite tack, portraying the founders of postwar American intelligence as adventurous idealists of strong conscience. They saw fighting Nazism and communism as necessary causes, and bravely took them up as a matter of honor and responsibility.

They took them up at great danger as well, and without the sort of prejudice sometimes reflexively ascribed to the rich and the white. The wartime Christophers in Germany have a history of risking imprisonment or worse by smuggling Jews out of the country.

This is the noble world Mr. McCarry has chosen, and he deftly portrays it in a way that entices readers in, rather than making it seem distant and removed.

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