Author: Charles McCarry
Publication: Mysterious Press, hardcover, 2015
Genre: Suspense
Setting: Present day
My Impression: Charles McCarry, like Ian Fleming and John Le Carré, became a successful espionage writer after being a spy himself. Originally from Massachusetts, he enlisted in the army after high school, and worked as a newspaper reporter and speechwriter before he was recruited by Allen Dulles for the CIA in the late 50s. Here is Tracy of Bitter Tea and Mystery's review of his best-known work, The Tears of Autumn (1974), which was his second book featuring Paul Christopher, a CIA agent who seems to have an ethical code. The protagonist of The Mulberry Bush, nameless like the heroine of Rebecca, cares only about revenge. This was not a problem for me as I am quite vengeful myself and enjoy it in fiction (The Dinosaur Club, Six of Crows, Love at First Spite) but resulted in a particularly joyless book. I thought Luz would bring some humanity to this dark man but she was a one-dimensional character just there to have nonstop sex with him and connect him to some pseudo-idealists. My favorite character was a Jesuit who helps the spy become fluent in Russian:
Father Yuri was a plain man with a brilliant mind. He seldom spoke a word a small child could not have understood or expressed a thought that didn’t turn out to be a Matryoshka doll. . . . He was a sturdy broad-shouldered man with the legs of a fullback. His thick gray hair was cut short. Ruddy complexion, Slavic cheekbones, pug nose. Like Chekhov he was a descendant of serfs and looked it. Clearly his face had been his fortune as he stayed alive and unimprisoned half a lifetime under the nose of the Soviet apparatus.
McCarry’s obituary in The Guardian praises “his grasp of the personal nature of spying, where betrayal lies at the heart of every action.” That is definitely true of this book but the one-note theme hurt the book because the protagonist (although fueled by vengeance) seemed to meander, just waiting for the right moment to infiltrate senior management, so to speak, of the CIA so he could destroy his father’s enemies. I chose The Mulberry Bush because I was curious about the author and it was a standalone but I found it disappointing (it was his final book; he died in 2019). Except for Father Yuri, spirited to America before the Russians can jail him (see, the CIA can do some things right in this book), there were no likable characters and the violent deaths got too gratuitously gory for me. I don’t think McCarry would be so highly regarded if this book was typical of his work, so I will try another one at some point and I'll be interested to see what Tracy thinks when she reads it. I suppose it could be me - I don't really like John Le Carré much either. Maybe I will stick with Anthony Price, whose espionage novels are also amusing.
Source: Personal copy. This was number ten of my 20 Books of Summer and my twenty-third book for Carol’s Cloak and Dagger Reading Challenge.
4 comments:
I did not read all of your review. I am about 100 pages into The Mulberry Bush now so I just read the first few sentences of your post and the last few, but I will come back as soon as I finish. I think you are right that this book, and the one before it (The Shanghai Factor), were different from his first two books. The others I read earlier and don't remember as well.
I am back now after finishing the book. I liked this book more than you did, although I would not consider it a 5 star read. I did have a problem with Luz's character; she just seemed to be there to provide an avenue to the main character's quest for revenge. And I could have done without the continuous references to their sex life. I cannot remember how well McCarry handled female characters in his earlier books.
I agree that there were no likable characters, but I did have sympathy for both the main protagonist and Luz, having been messed up by the baggage of their early lifes.
But still, I enjoyed reading it; I was trying to figure out exactly what his plan was and how he imagined he could succeed. I was involved in the story from beginning to end, and did not want to put it down.
That is interesting about John le Carre. I have only read 8 or 9 of his books, and most of those were George Smiley books. About half of them I liked a lot, the others less so. I actually did not finish The Night Manager, and that is very rare for me. But I still hope to read more of his books.
Reading the rest of Anthony Price's books is a priority for me, I just have to find copies.
Do you think he really cared about Luz? I thought the direction it was going was that he would have to choose between his marriage and revenge - I didn't think he cared enough about her to choose her but that is the more conventional plot development.
Now that I think about it, the father was the most congenial character! And even if the wife moved on from him, it was unfair to distance herself from her son.
Was he nameless to complete the image of the perfect spy/ghost?
I think he did care about Luz but he just could not let go of his goal for revenge. I also think Luz's motivations were very complicated.
The father was probably the most likable character, especially in the brief time they had together.
I never know why an author makes the choice to have nameless character, but I think your explanation works. And he was the perfect spy. John le Carré's The Perfect Spy has a protagonist whose life as a spy was strongly influenced by his father (and the father is supposed to be a lot like le Carré's father). That is my favorite book by le Carré.
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