BOOKS
God and fantasy
A. N. Wilson
The Turn-around Vladimir Volkoff (Bodley Head pp.411, £6.95) This is a brilliant novel, translated from the French into the most impeccably fluent and natural-seeming English prose. But it is primarily concerned with the phenomenon of being Russian. It is a spy story, set in Paris in the 1960s written by a self-confessed admirer of John le Carr& and it is dedicated to Graham Greene. But that is really only a part of it. It is not wholly absurd to mention it in the same breath as Dostoevsky; andit certainly belongs in spirit very closely to the view of the world discovered by Christian exiles as diverse as Solzhenitsyn and Anthony Bloom.
One is let in gently, by the highly amusing voice of Volsky, the narrator-hero, a white Russian, born and bred in France, where he is a lieutenant in Intelligence. He lunches with his American opposite number, a crude Texan called Lester. 'He often said that for him I was the embodiment of France, which, in view of my Tartar origins, certainly had its funny side, but I knew what he meant: I was small, frivolous, snobbish, behind the times, insignificant, and yet he was forced to take me seriously . . .' Back in his own office, however, they think less highly of him, and he is on the verge of being sent abroad for greatly unwanted foreign service when he manages to dream up, out of his head, the pretended existence of something called 'Operation Culverin' which, he alleges, is a hush-hush scheme, known to only a very few members of the French Intelligence, and designed to 'turn around' a Russian agent, newly arrived at their Embassy in Paris, one Popov.
The whole thing, once credited by the right handful of people, proceeds as smoothly as if it were a 'real' operation. The narrator constantly likens the task of the spy to that of the novelist; Volsky himself is, as it happens, an aspirant litterateur, and the book is full of the high absurdity and unreality of the world of espionage. Perhaps it is a fact which English readers no longer need to be reminded of, but it is done, for all that, with consummate panache.
`Operation Culverin' can be set up as easily as any other, even though it is based on a pure fabrication. Popov, as far as is known, has no intention of defecting to the West. Everything that emerges about him suggests the opposite. He is a brutal, wholly committed Bolshevik, making his way purposefully up through the ranks of the KGB, and, in all probability further, into the Kremlin itself. Nevertheless, he is trailed in the usual manner (and his sexual tastes duly noted — he is a widower who has got through a string of blonde Bona-Robas, whom he has treated with insatiable violence); an actress is set up to 'compromise' him.
She is a Russian too; her name is Marina. The twist comes when, `Operation Culverin' almost given up for lost, they finally think they have a lead. Popov and Marina, making no attempts to cover their traces, boldly walk out of a Metro together. The reader is led by this stage to expect some fairly strong scene of erotic passion. They reach the door of their place of assignation and walk in. But the door is that of a church.
Everything, from the point of view of the fantasists, goes wrong from here on. Marina has not been a shameless whore; she is devout, Orthodox and chaste. By her chance introduction of the smell of incense into Popov's nostrils, she brings about a `turn-around' of a sort never foreseen or intended. Popov, the arch-atheist, thug and murderer, is converted to God.
In a long, and very moving scene, we can read the transcript of Popov's confession to the priest; (the lectern where the Orthodox make their confession has of course been bugged). Popov, who has lived all his life passionately consumed with his belief in Leninism, is brave enough to face the fact that he has been wrong. The smell of the incense has brought back his most painful childhood memory: betraying his Christian parents to the authorities for their attendance at an 'underground' church. Yet there is something brutally unsentimental about the confession. It's because God exists and because He exists one cannot live as if He didn't is how he explains his willingness to sacrifice everything for his convictions. To him, a dogmatist of one sort or another since earliest infancy, it makes sense. To the Frenchmen listening to the tape it is absurd. In the West, there is no discernible difference in the behaviour of theists and atheists. Once you start actually taking God seriously the people who will attack you most fiercely are not the atheists but the side You are trying to join. It would spoil the plot of this superb novel if a reviewer gave away Popov's fate, or die reaction of Volsky's bosses when it is discovered that the success of the fictitious 'Culverin' would automatically 'blow' the 'real' contacts made through' Crocodile', Topeye' and `Greek Fire'. It would spoil it: but it would also miss the point. The Floi°' of the book, really, is that the seriousness with which espionage is regarded is no more than a symptom of the fact that those wh° do not face Popov's choice, and think they can live without God, must do so cocoone° either in cynical sensuality or, if it is different, in pure fantasy. This sounds weighty stuff for what never stops being a highly entertaining book.13131 the Russians, because of Tolstoy an' Dostoevski, have a developed literary tradition which enables them to be 0°111, religious without being embarrassing, a gr denied even the subtlest practitioners in r°,..e West. However, Vladimir Volkoff, by hill" and choice, is a Westerner too. His urbane and exciting book was a best-seller France, and it certainly deserves to be one over here.
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