Old scores

CHARLES McCARRY brings a spy’s analytical mind and a poet’s lapidary style to his justly praised espionage novels, so it’s no surprise to learn that he was a CIA agent during the Cold War, operating under deep cover in Europe, Asia and Africa.

But job experience will take an author only so far. Our greatest spy novels aren’t concerned just with gadgets, lingo and tradecraft, they’re also alive with compelling characters and moral dilemmas that resonate long afterward in a reader’s mind. McCarry has been developing his main character for decades, and readers are richer for it. He isn’t writing spy novels as much as elegant installments in the life of his most fascinating creation -- that “Old Boy” and second-generation spy Paul Christopher, whose adventures have ranged from pre-World War II Berlin through the Cold War to the current war on terror.

In many ways, Christopher is the anti-James Bond. He abhors violence, avoids car chases and is a serial monogamist. These aren’t testosterone tales hauling the reader through 300 pages by brutal force of will. Still, the tension, menace and paranoia that run like a subterranean current through McCarry’s novels are all the more chilling for being rendered in such spare, crystalline prose.

For longtime fans who remember McCarry’s 1973 debut, “The Miernik Dossier,” as well as newcomers curious to see what the fuss is about, his 10th book, “Christopher’s Ghosts,” offers the most tantalizing entry yet in the life of the cerebral, cultured and introspective spy whose ability to disengage his mind from his heart makes him an ideal agent but a flawed human being.

In a much earlier book, “The Secret Lovers” (1977), Christopher’s beautiful first wife, Cathy, complains about her husband’s emotional reticence. “I think there was, at some time in the past, a girl,” Cathy intuits with a lover’s ESP. “One girl out of all the ones you’ve had. I think you loved her the way I love you, Paul. I think she spoiled you for me. She poisoned you.”

In “Christopher’s Ghosts,” we finally meet that girl, and much of what formed Paul’s character is at long last revealed.

The story starts in Berlin’s Tiergarten one summer afternoon just weeks before World War II begins, when 16-year-old Paul, son of an American father and a Prussian mother, is attacked by a Hitler Youth gang. As he lies stunned on the park’s grass, a mysterious teenage girl creeps up, tends to his wounds and takes him home to her father, a renowned Jewish surgeon prohibited from practicing.

Deeply smitten, Paul christens the girl “Rima,” after the heroine of his favorite novel, “Green Mansions,” and has schoolboy visions of earnest talks and walks in the park. But Rima, who senses the coming Holocaust in her bones, has other ideas. “I can’t bear the thought of dying before I have known love -- everything about it. Everything,” she tells Paul.

When Rima announces after their first tryst that “nothing like this will ever happen to us again,” Paul understands that “this hour will haunt him for the rest of his life. He wept. Rima, dry-eyed now, smiled down at him. She said softly, ‘Oh my love.’ ”

We know things will end badly for the war-crossed lovers, which steeps the book’s first half in almost unbearable tension and melancholy. What young Paul can’t imagine, but longtime McCarry readers know from “The Last Supper” (1983), is that another, even more deadly drama also is playing out in the Christopher household.

The Gestapo has learned that Paul’s parents, patrician Hubbard Christopher and his beautiful, gray-eyed German aristocrat wife, Hannelore, or Lori, have been ferrying Jewish refugees from the Baltic Coast to Denmark during nighttime sails aboard their sloop, Mahican. Even worse, sinister SS chief Reinhard Heydrich has fallen in love with Lori and spirits her away for afternoon assignations while his factotum, the truly deranged Maj. Franz Stutzer, hauls off Paul and his father for questioning at Gestapo headquarters.

Compromised to her very core, unable to tell her husband and desperate to save her family, Lori is the book’s most tragic and haunted character. Unlike some of his counterparts who tend to write two-dimensional women, McCarry has created a full-blooded, devastating portrait of a doomed woman who has nowhere to turn.

McCarry is also good at conveying the lazy, privileged insouciance of a certain breed of American. Whether from ignorance or arrogance, Paul’s father seems to think he’s still playing out some ritual from Yale’s elite Skull and Bones society and refuses to consider that the journal in which he describes their exploits could land the family in a concentration camp -- or dead.

Paul’s father “looked amused when being questioned by Stutzer, as if he had bought a ticket to a play that was so bad that it was interesting. It was hard to imagine a more dangerous look to have on your face when visiting No. 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse.”

The book has an epic, elegiac sweep as it recounts the mounting dread, the tightening noose and the devil’s bargains being struck. One smells the cold salt winds of the leaden Baltic, feels the chalky cliffs of Rugen, the island where Lori’s family has its ancestral Schloss.

Part 2 opens 20 years later when Paul Christopher, now a CIA agent, sees his nemesis Stutzer one winter night on a rain-splashed Berlin street and pursues him. Hubbard was murdered by unknown assailants; Lori disappeared in the Nazi apocalypse, her fate unknown. Stutzer, reborn as an East German Stasi officer whose sadism and interrogation skills are welcomed by the secret police agency, surely holds the answers Christopher desperately seeks.

The cat-and-mouse chase between the two men and their ultimate showdown proceeds at a breathless, frenetic pace that hits all the marks of the best Cold War thrillers but somehow lacks the transcendence of the book’s first half.

It’s almost as if two different books had been grafted together, the first an excruciatingly tense ode to a time gone by, the second a pure historical thriller. The two parts have such distinct tones that they might have been written decades apart.

But readers of previous novels will welcome the cast of familiar characters -- Yeho, the legendary head of the Mossad; David Patchen, Christopher’s Harvard roommate, now high up in “The Outfit”; and brusque, blue-collar Barney Wolkowicz, the Berlin head of station.

It’s wonderful to see McCarry’s readership expanding with each new book, thanks to Overlook Press, which has reprinted his earlier novels (and also published Robert Littell’s “The Company,” a fictionalized history of the CIA). The sheer ambition of McCarry’s spy novels catapults him into the company of John Le Carre, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene and Alan Furst, but his stylish voice and historic scope make him unique.