Alien reading matter

Byron Rogers

THE COMPANY by Robert Littell Pan Macmillan, £16.99, pp. 894, ISBN 0333746996 If you want to know what living in a parallel universe is like, buy this novel about the CIA. It is bad, and not just bad, this is off all the indices of badness, but it comes trailing the plaudits of American literary critics who have compared its author to Homer, Shakespeare and Dickens. The Washington Times wished it could have been twice its 900-page length. The Chicago Tribune was ecstatic ('the novelist never lost this reader for even a single page'), and as for the Washington Post: 'Once I picked it up I did not want to put it down.' What sort of people are these, do they look like us, does a single sun stand in their sky?

I wanted to put it down on page 50, with 850 to go, but slowly and insidiously the gloom lightened and I read on in a sort of fascinated stupor, just to see how far the man would go. And the man went all the way.

Read this sentence aloud. Revel in its syntax, its rhythms, its punctuation:

Leo, an ardent, angry young man who had been raised in a family of anti-Communist Russian-Jewish immigrants and was majoring in Slavic languages, on a full scholarship, spoke Russian and Yiddish like a native and Italian like a tourist.

That throwaway 'on a full scholarship' shows the hand of a master. And that's Leo done, the little marionette coloured in and ready to wander into a cast of hundreds.

Women characters are easier to distinguish from each other, for they have nipples and thighs, so one has 'silvery thighs', another has 'dark nipples', and sometimes the whole index can be invoked:

Your nose is too big for starters. Your nipples are too prominent, too girl-like as opposed to woman-like, your shoulders are too bony, your pubic hair is too sparse .

Sadly the male characters are not accorded such indices of anatomy, which might have proved interesting in the case of Kim Philby, who is only allowed a stammer and a sort of English no Englishman ever spoke. 'I say, that's a spiffy wagon you have out at the curb. Please d-d-do come in.'

This is your first sight of a Russian:

Yevgenny, a sturdy, sandy-haired young man whose pale eyes seemed to change colour with his moods, was majoring in American history and had become something of a Revolutionary War buff; he had pored over Pennypacker's General Washington's Spies and Trevelyan's The American Revolution, and had actually followed in Washington's footsteps, walking during winter recess the route the Continental Army had taken from Valley Forge across the frozen Delaware to Trenton ..

All those facts, and not one of them relevant.

Page 61:

Eleonora (pronounced with an Italian lilt ever since the young Eleanor Krandal had spent a junior semester at Radcliffe studying Etruscan jewellery at the Villa Giulia in Rome) was painting her fingernails for the dinner party that night, when Ebby, stirring an absinth and water with a silver swizzle stick, wandered into the bedroom.

Absinth and water? In Washington in the 1950s? Ah well, if he says so. Eleonora, I should add, has 'small, pointed breasts'.

No noun is allowed out without an adjective, no cliché neglected.

A ruggedly handsome OSS veteran, he favoured his visitor with one of his legendary gap-toothed smiles. 'Welcome aboard, Ebby,' he said, offering a resolute paw.

That was page 60. Page 64:

The Otis elevator lifting Ebby with motionless speed to the 69th floor of the Chrysler Building was thick with cigar smoke and the latest news bulletins.

Robert Littell likes to see his nouns yoked. Somewhere one of the marionettes glistens 'with pride and perspiration'.

As this book is aimed either at readers in outer space or at those who have lived through the 20th century but not been part of it, the characters spend a great deal of time briefing each other on events.

This is Ebby again, post-absinth in the bedroom, briefing his wife:

Frank Wisner says the country is at peril and he's not the only one to think so. Mr Luce called this the American century, but at the half-way mark it's beginning to look more like the Soviet century. The Czechoslovak President, Mr Masaryk, was thrown out of a window and the last free East European country went down the drain ...

And so on. And on. That's page 63, by the way, and Ebby the while is trying to do up the zip on his wife's dress. Eleonora, 'skirt flaring above elegant ankles', has clearly been kidnapped by aliens when the above was going on.

As clearly throughout the 1950s have most of Ebby's colleagues in the CIA, for later he is obliged to brief them on Cuba:

[Castro] and a handful of guerrilla fighters sailed to Cuba on a small yacht, took to the mountains and survived everything Batista could throw at them, and finally walked into Havana when Batista lost his nerve and ran for it. Today Castro is 32 years old, a confident and vigorous man on the top of his game, with zealous supporters in the military and civilian infrastructure.

That's page 455.

But it is easy to spot the good guys from the bad, and not just for their politics, for the KGB spy-master is a paedophile, and not just a monogamous paedophile: this bloke has four prepubescent girls crawling all over him as he reads them Alice in Wonderland. But, oh dear, even this monster cannot resist briefing his nymphets:

'And what country is on the page open before you, Uncle?'

'Why, it is called Vietnam.'

The girl giggled into his ear. 'I have never heard anyone speak of a country with the name of Vietnam.'

'Rest assured, you will,' said Stank.

Some 50,000 copies of this were sold before publication. Anyone connected with it, publishers and agents, should be ashamed of themselves, but not the author. I regard him as a force of nature.