Word: samson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...narrative's first volume, Berlin Game, began with heavy irony, as Deighton's hero Bernard Samson, a British agent watching for trouble at the Wall, asked his friend Werner Volkmann, "How long have we been sitting here?" and Volkmann answered sourly, "Nearly a quarter of a century." Spy Line, set in the present, starts off with a joke that might have been heard over coffee at a Tory think tank: "Glasnost is trying to escape over the Wall, and getting shot with a silenced machine gun!" Its pivotal violence is a bloody shoot-out during an attempted escape along...
That sort of crudeness, recent events seem to be saying, is no longer imaginable. Thus agent Samson, with his perfect, idiomatic Berliner Deutsch and his deep knowledge of levels of murk and treachery on both sides of the Wall, is suddenly out of date. As are, an optimist dutifully believes, many thousands of border guards, KGB head beaters and assassins in the real world. Espionage will go on, of course, but presumably it will be of the corporate kind, waged among Japan, Korea and the European Community, which is apt to | include Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, what used to be called...
Luckily for Deighton, there is no sign of change in his narrative's other engine of mischief, the mole-ridden, class-clotted English intelligence apparatus. A considerable part of the fun of the author's nearly endless chronicle has always been his seething contempt, and Samson's, for England's upper-class bumblers, and for Oxbridge leftists of the Kim Philby stamp. Readers who have followed Samson from Berlin Game will recall that his very upper-class wife Fiona, also an English intelligence agent, defected to East Germany and set up shop as a KGB colonel, no less...
This is parody, of course, and not just of recent, mole-infested history, but of that other cold war, the one between divorced ex-husbands and their former wives. One of Samson's deep fears has been that Fiona would get custody of their two teenage children and spirit them off to the G.D.R. Fiona surfaces with a flourish in the current novel, her fans will be glad to learn, leaving two important issues unresolved. One is whether she was a real defector or, possibly, a truly extraordinary double agent. The other is how long Gloria, Samson's newly acquired...
...this has bubbled cheerfully in the two novels that followed Berlin Game in Deighton's first Samson trilogy, Mexico Set and London Match, and then in Spy Hook, the beginning of a second trilogy, which has Samson under suspicion and on the run from his own colleagues. The current Spy Line sags just a bit, but it will lead, readers are assured, to resolution in a promised final thriller, Spy Sinker. Will Fiona and Samson retire to a cottage in Cornwall and argue over lunch? More important, will Deighton or anyone else find a menace to replace the Wall? Lite...