It's just too easy | The Amateur Spy

A fish out of water | The Amateur Spy | Dan Fesperman

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	• The Amateur Spy Dan Fesperman Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2007 - 432 pages average customer review:based on 9 reviews view larger image
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It's all about religion.

One of the hottest flashpoints in the world today is the Middle East. Iraq is, of course, for most Americans, the hottest area. But Iraq is closely followed by the Israel-Jordan-Palestine region, which is where the bulk of Dan Fesperman's The Amateur Spy and the dramatic action takes place. Smaller, but no less important segments of the book take place on a Greek island, and in the Washington, D.C., area.
Another eight years and it will be a century since the longest and bloodiest chapter in modern world history came into being with the signing of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This secret agreement conflicted with an earlier agreement which enlisted the help of the Arabs in World War One, the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence. Sykes-Picot and Hussein-McMahon were both products of diplomatic scrambling by the British government during the darkest of that period of the war. At the risk of oversimplification, the first agreement promised the Arabs certain areas of the Middle East in exchange for their help in Britain's war against the Axis. Sykes-Picot then promised some of those same areas as a Jewish homeland, in exchange for the assistance of influential Jews in the United States in bringing the US into the war. I want to emphasize that this paragraph is a gross oversimplification, and the Middle East is an area in which you should do your own study, and form your own conclusions, if you're interested. And considering the number of lives and dollars that area of the world has cost the U.S., and continues to cost and otherwise affect the US and the entire rest of the world, every citizen of planet Earth should be interested.
The events of the past nearly hundred years as briefly described above are the background and basis of The Amateur Spy. They're not necessary for a thorough enjoyment of a good read, but they do put a lot of things into their proper context and perspective. The book's beginning and later events also exemplify the words of the poet (John Lennon): "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
The novel opens with a couple making a trip to their retirement home on the island of Karos, in the Cyclades, off the coast of Greece. They're in that home for less than 24 hours when their forced adventure begins, and the husband, Freeman, is un-retired and put to work as a spy. His lack of experience in spying becomes the book's title and the theme of the story. How he's forced into spying, what led up to it and what transpires afterward make the main story. There's also a back story that's connected to Freeman's, and it all comes to a dramatic conclusion at -- where else? -- the end. The adventure, and there's plenty of it, weaves into and out of the story throughout the book, while intricately and inexorably connecting the two stories and their final intersection.
The Amateur Spy slows down about halfway through; also about the same point the dialogue loses some of its snap, as if the author had a difficult time with it. I feel he could have left out quite a bit in this section, tightened up the remaining narrative, eliminated the unneeded and sometimes clumsy complications in the plot, and had a much more readable and effective story, as well as making the plot and the action unbroken throughout.
Fortunately, Festerman finds his pace and style again, making the last hundred or so pages as fast-paced and dramatic as the first half of the book. Freeman is in over his head a good part of the time, but considering his background, his current predicament, and the complication of his situation, it's understandable. The twists and turns of the world of international spy games are daunting at times. And as they should, the loose ends tie up neatly at the end.
What's particularly striking and commendable about The Amateur Spy is that it attempts to give a more balanced view of the Arab-Israeli situation than one is used to seeing in U.S. newspapers and other media. The book doesn't go into it too heavily, however, which is appropriate for any novel, but it does get into it enough to whet the appetite for more details, which is also appropriate. In today's U.S. media, the situation is parallel to a situation described in the book. When a person attempts to present a fair and balanced overall picture of the situation in the Middle East, he or she is tabbed as anti-Semitic. Which is ironic in itself, considering that Arabs, too, are descended from Shem, the eldest son of Noah, much to the chagrin of many. Pragmatically, there's negligible difference between the Sunni-Shiite rift and the Arab-Israeli rift. It's all about religion, isn't it?

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It's just too easy

A lot of the events in this novel just seem to happen too easily- the main character begins spying on his old friend Omar after the briefest of moral struggles. Is he supposed to be amoral ? I wasn't sure. And then he hops into bed with another old friend as revenge for what he imagines are his wife's infidelities. In the real world, all the amateurish snooping around he does in Athens and Amman would get him seriously busted up. Again, it's just too easy for him. I was also underwhelmed by the deep, dark secret Freeman is concealing from his wife, which allows him to be blackmailed in the first place. The nick-of-time ending is totally predictable. The author does a good job of description of the various locales, as well as illustrating the daily humiliations which many Arab-Americans have undoubtedly faced since 9/11.

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A fish out of water

THE AMATEUR SPY is one of those novels that at various points leaves a reader torn between rapidly turning the pages and throwing the book across the room. By turns intriguing and confounding, it reflects our time and our world --- neither of which are pretty --- in a story that is ultimately intriguing but requires one too many leaps of faith.

Freeman Lockhart wants nothing more than to retire from his humanitarian aid work and withdraw from the world with his wife Mila to a small, almost pastoral Greek island. Their idyllic existence never really gets off the ground; their first night on the island is interrupted by three men who subject Freeman to a stiff-legged recruitment pitch for spying on Omar al-Baroody, a Palestinian with whom Freeman had worked and subsequently befriended several years before. Omar is ostensibly involved in a fund-raising project in Jordan to build a much-needed hospital, but may or may not be tied to something more nefarious. The prod for Freeman's cooperation is blackmail; he has a secret that he has long kept from Mila, supposedly for her own good, and her continued ignorance is the coin that his mysterious recruiters are willing to pay.

Freeman is easily --- almost too easily --- able to insert himself into Omar's fund-raising operation, where he finds that his old friend is indeed involved in things above and beyond humanitarian causes. Yet Freeman himself is in way over his head; he is caught between factions, governmental and otherwise, with his every move scrutinized by shadowy figures who seem to be operating at cross-purposes to each other.

Meanwhile, in a Washington, D.C. suburb, Abbas Rahim, a prominent Palestinian-American surgeon and his wife Aliyah continue working through the grief occasioned by the accidental death of their daughter one year ago. Abbas blames, somewhat improbably, the post-9/11 posture of the United States government and, inspired by a radio report of a terrorist act abroad, cooks up a bloody revenge of his own. Aliyah, horrified by her husband's plot, is determined to stop him. So she travels to Jordan for the apparent purpose of acquiring the expertise that Abbas needs to carry out his misguided revenge. Aliyah finds, however, that her actions have only served to clear the way for Abbas to execute his plan. Aliyah's path barely, almost imperceptibly, intersects with Freeman's. Yet it may or may not be enough to prevent the occurrence of Abbas's plan, which, if successful, will dramatically change the complexion of world politics.

Dan Fesperman's writing continues to be compelling. But where THE AMATEUR SPY gets snagged is upon the motives of its principal characters. The event that Freeman so desperately wishes to keep secret from his wife (which I am deliberately not revealing), while a horrible one, ultimately has little to do with their actions and everything to do with those of the terrorists. It is a stretch, to say the least, to hold the Lockharts accountable in any way. The irony of the book --- Freeman, pressed into service to spy on a relatively innocent player, inadvertently uncovers a much larger, more significant plot and cannot get anyone to listen --- is almost lost in the conclusion, which keeps several loose threads dangling in the wind.

Perhaps that is the point of the novel: in the Middle East, nothing is resolved or concluded --- there is merely a succession of events. The ultimate strength of THE AMATEUR SPY, however, is the manner in which Lockhart, a fish out of water, manages to survive in a very dangerous land.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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Lacks suspense

If you're trying to decide which Fesperman book to read first, try "The Prisoner of Guantanamo." If you like it, then explore some of his other works, such as "The Amateur Spy." At no point in this book do I feel as though the main character is in any imminent danger. How can you read a spy book and, at times, not eagerly turn the pages, staying up past your bed time, because you want to find out whether the protagonist can successfully high tail it away from danger? As usual, though, Fesperman's above average descriptions of international locations help compensate for the book's lack of suspense.

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