A spy story

In the course of a visit to London yesterday, I paid a visit to the platform library at Raynes Park station, picking up various odds and ends. For some reason, I have been doing rather well there of late.

One of the odds and ends was a cold war spy story called 'The Defection of A. J. Lewinter', written by one Robert Littell, reprinted from the US edition by Hodder and Stoughton in 1973, the same year as it was published over there.

A book which was bought by Sutton Libraries in 1973 and handed down to their branch in Wallington, who lent it out perhaps 40 times in the period to 1981. The book has not been officially withdrawn from service, that is to say decorated with large blue stamps to that effect, so perhaps it is AWOL. It has also been rather badly treated with the bottom of the book curiously eaten away. It looks to me like water action, but rodents may also have been involved. Luckily, most of the evidence could be scraped away and the pages could be separated without doing further damage. And the book has now been read, my first spy story for as long as I can remember. Not a bad read, although I did flag a bit towards the end of its 230 pages. A read which suggested to me that the author knew more about Russia and Russians than was usual for writers of such stuff.

It turns out that the author is an almost exact contemporary of our own John le Carré, with the important difference that he is still alive, while le Carré died last year.  Born in Brooklyn, of Russian Jewish stock, so entirely possible that he speaks and reads Russian. And this was the first of about twenty spy books that he went on to write, so he clearly did quite well.

With the complicated plot very much reminding me of le Carré. How can you be sure that a defector really is a defector, with real goods to trade, and not some kind of complicated plant. With the added complication that neither the Russians who got the defector nor the Americans who gave him are sure whether the goods, apparently of the greatest importance, are real or not. With both sides playing all kinds of complicated games to try and work it all out.

Not yet hooked enough to go out and get more, although I dare say I would read another if it fell into my lap, as this one did.

Another of the odds and ends was a DVD of a film called 'The Notebook', a gentle romantic drama by a seemingly even more successful author of whom I have never heard, one Nicholas Sparks, originally from Omaha. Now consumed over two sittings. I dare say we will watch it again some time.

It seems that Sparks and his wife, before they divorced, gave a lot of money to the school at reference 3: 'The Epiphany School of Global Studies, anchored in the Judeo-Christian commandment to Love God and Your Neighbor as Yourself, is a comprehensive college-preparatory and globally-focused school where dynamic and innovative learning is stretched beyond the classroom walls, emphasizing the knowledge, skills, creativity, adaptability, curiosity, and international experiences students will need to flourish in an increasingly globalized 21st century'. Only in America. Two campuses in North Carolina - where 'The Notebook' happens to have been set. Fees of around $10,000 a year. Quite cheap by the standards of fancy schools in this country.

So two fairy stories, both with tenuous connections to the real world. But both stories which clearly push plenty of buttons for plenty of people. Including this one, who read the one and watched the other.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Littell_(author).

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Sparks.

Reference 3: https://www.epiphanyglobalschool.org/.

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