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This is a book of two halves. The first 172 pages are concerned with events which occurred in the life of 16 year old Paul Christopher in Berlin in the summer of 1939. Paul and his parents, Hubbard, a maverick American writer and Lori, a German Baroness, are the objects of incessant harassment from the Nazi authorities. When Paul falls in love with the daughter of a Jewish doctor his, and their, situation becomes even more perilous. Chief among their persecutors is SS Officer Stutzer. The second half on the book opens in 1959 with Paul, now a CIA agent, recognising Stutzer, astonishingly still alive, and starting a long process of tracking him down. If the book is one of two very distinct halves in terms of narrative and time-frame, it is also one of two very distinct halves in terms of quality. The first half is quite astonishingly good. I have not so far in my RTE reviewing career been generous with superlatives but the first half of CHRISTOPHER'S GHOSTS deserves every single one that could be thrown at it. The writing is of a marvellous beauty and it is by turns evocative, moving, chilling, erotic, gripping, horrifying. There is something very Proustian about the opening when Paul first spies his love in the Tiergarten. The story of their love affair succeeds - a very rare combination - in being both genuinely convincing and erotic. It is of course doomed; they know it is doomed, the reader knows it is doomed, but both we and they keep hope alive. McCarry's account of Nazi interrogation techniques break through this idyll with a horrible force and are truly shocking while never descending to exploitation. Every single character is drawn with precision and their voices - for in this first half other narrative voices are used - are compelling. Paul, Alexa, Hubbard, Lori, Stutzer, O.J (Paul's godfather and American diplomat), Paulus (Paul's German uncle) and his wife Hilde, all are rich and fascinating. Landscapes are drawn with precision and grace. And through all this the narrative grips like a vice - one is torn between a compulsion to read on and a wish to put the book down so that the inevitable cataclysm will not descend; but when it does it is with an image of quite mesmerising beauty. Sadly, perhaps inevitably, the second half of the book does not live up to the first. This is a much more conventional spy thriller with Christopher now as a somewhat enigmatic CIA agent driven by the demons of his past. There are few LeCarrean ambiguities here - the CIA are basically the good eyes combatting the evil Reds. There is still some magnificent writing and the narrative lines are strong but the variety and richness of the first half of the book are gone. We have only one narrative voice and that is Christopher's. It is of course part of the book's essential design that 'Paul' disappears. He was a figure of adolescence, destroyed by the events of 1939, and is buried deep within 'Christopher', the adult figure, emotions and feelings locked away. This is a strong conceit but it is not perhaps allowed sufficient room to breath and only emerges in full flight in the book's very last sentences. It also means that McCarry has to make the second half of the book quite different from the first - the colour went out of Paul's world in 1939 and cannot be brought back. One appreciates the artistic design, but it does mean the book's two halves vary substantially in terms of the quality of the writing. Much more problematically the moral world of good versus evil which so aptly describes the situation in 1939 transmits more than a little uneasily to that of the Cold War, not to mention the Arab-Israeli conflict which is intruded on the narrative. So a book of two halves. But such is the beauty ,precision, elegance, and power of the first half that I would unhesitatingly give this book the highest recommendation - you will get 172 pages which are certainly the best I have read for this site to date. I must however observe that these pages are in no sense a mystery; they are not even a 'spy novel' or 'thriller' (though the second half might fall under either description). This is not to detract from their quality but to point out that this book does not 'transcend' any genre because it is genreless. Whatever the category however - read it!
Reviewed by Nick Hay, October 2008
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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