Spies Like Us : THE GIANT’S SHADOW <i> by Thomas Bontly (Random House: $17.95; 303 pp.)</i>

Spy novelists today fall into two distinct categories. Those like Len Deighton and John Le Carre write about ordinary people who happen to be spies. Their virtue lies partly in their ability to give us access to a secret world we could not otherwise know. Writers like Ian Fleming and Robert Ludlum, on the other hand, place their unusually gifted protagonists in a fantasy world that liberates and gratifies the instincts. Whether realistic or escapist, espionage fiction at its best satisfies our need to believe that individual lives can still count for something in the modern world. We can still influence the course of history, maybe decisively.

In “The Giant’s Shadow,” Thomas Bontly has written a hybrid of the realistic and escapist espionage genres. His hero, at least as the novel opens, is recognizably human. Sam Abbot is a middle-aged English professor teaching for a semester in West Germany; he has left behind him in Wisconsin a drinking problem and a failing marriage. Burdened (inconveniently for a prospective spy) with “an excessive and irrational fear of death” but possessed of an “aching desire to escape his old life and begin anew,” Abbot is the generic innocent-American-abroad-about-to-be-drawn-into-a-web-of intrigue.

The call to adventure comes from a colleague of Abbot’s at the university, a Polish archeologist whom Abbot finds dying in the nearby woods. Pajorfsky is the victim of a murderous attack by a mysterious scarred assassin, who almost kills Abbot at the same time. Before he dies, Pajorfsky manages to hand over to Abbot a photograph taken 25 years earlier of Abbot himself as a young man at Cambridge. Also in the photo is the great friend of Abbot’s youth, the brilliant poet, Jeremy Sawyer. But Sawyer defected to the Soviet Union in 1968, apparently in protest of the Vietnam War, and Abbot has had no contact with him since. Is he being summoned? Pajorfsky’s last words suggest so: “It comes to you from the Stork.”

Partial enlightenment comes the next day from Pajorfsky’s research assistant, a beautiful East German emigre who tells Abbot that the archeologist was actually murdered by the KGB. Greta and Pajorfsky are members of ELF (the European Liberation Front), an underground anti-Communist organization working “to make all Europe free.” The Stork is their most important agent behind the Iron Curtain; he has delivered many defectors to the West. Now Sawyer has grown weary of life in the Soviet Union. He wants to return to the West--a propaganda coup--with a manuscript that describes the course of his disillusionment. And he won’t budge until his old friend Abbot agrees to edit the book that ELF believes “could change the course of history.”

What follows is predictable enough in broad outline, given the progressively escapist development of the plot. Abbot is followed by a man in a trench coat, drugged by ELF before being taken to their headquarters (“it is better for all of us if you do not know how to find this place again,”), given a code name that is never again used, and captured briefly by the East Germans after a meeting with Sawyer in Berlin. Abbot acquires a gun and shoots several people, falls in with some hard-talking CIA men for a time, sleeps with Greta, and sleeps with the woman Sawyer has left behind in Cambridge, whom Abbot has always loved and who (it turns out) has always loved Abbot. In this process of discovering through action his raison d’etre, Abbot finally emerges from the shadow of Sawyer, the literary giant he has always envied.

“The Giant’s Shadow” builds to a fairly gripping conclusion, in which a helicopter crashes, furious weapon fire is exchanged, and many secrets are revealed (in unexpected but plausible ways) about Sawyer, the Stork, the KGB assassin, etc. Yet taken as a whole, the novel is an extraordinarily unoriginal amalgam of bits and pieces from earlier suspense stories and films, unleavened by any stylistic felicity. (Hot bath water is “fiery liquid”; German waitresses are “apple-cheeked.”) While Abbot himself is credible enough as a character, the adventure he embarks upon is not. As escapist espionage fiction, “The Giant’s Shadow” is missing the playfulness of a James Bond novel or the sheer imaginativeness of Ludlum.

At the core of the novel, however, lies the Abbot-Sawyer relationship, and here the fantasy takes a unique turn for a spy novel. Bontly (himself a professor of English in Wisconsin) seems to be imagining through Abbot, and ultimately through Sawyer, what it would be like to produce a book that could change the course of history. He’s fantasizing that the pen might indeed be mightier than the sword--and it’s his pen.

As the novel develops, though, Sawyer gets deflated to the point of sheer insignificance; he turns out to be a physical wreck, a terrible lover, and maybe even a fraud. It’s Abbot--and the values Abbot represents--that Bontly wants to align himself with in the end. And these, oddly enough, are the values of the sword: “The intellectual life has to be translated into action before it can be . . . validated,” says Abott in extracting the moral from his story.

But this is a pernicious philosophy, and a false one. It’s one thing to long for a life of physical action and ethical simplicity in an age like ours--that’s all J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, was doing when he sent his hobbits out to destroy the magic ring. It’s quite another to assert as a moral argument that the contemplative life has no meaning. This book is deeply ambivalent about its own right to exist.