Mauled in the Den of Literary Lions

A decade ago, the suggestion at a cocktail party that John LeCarre could craft a sentence with the best of them might earn the admiring glances of smoky women with penciled eyebrows but little serious attention. Nowadays, LeCarre and his genre-straddling uncle Graham Greene are the literary exemplars of a new generation of writers. Action first, adjective second is their motto. Pile on the politics, emote from the hip.

W.T. Tyler, “a former diplomat who saw the human cost of Cold War hubris and moral bankruptcy” (or so reads the dust jacket to “The Consul’s Wife”), is a pretender to the crown. There is no question that he knows his territory. Hugh Matthews, the cynical hero of Tyler’s latest novel, a junior American diplomat living in Beirut in the waning years of Vietnam, is savvy, yet absent-minded enough to wander across the Lebanese frontier into a Syrian border patrol. This minor scandal gets him posted out of Eden and into the Congo, soon to be renamed Zaire.

“The Consul’s Wife” opens with a number of fascinating vignettes involving confused gauleiters, manic Mobutu-ites and frustrated sorcerers who vainly pit their weather magic against the technology of Americans who have put a man on the moon. Matthews admits to a fascination with the Bena N’Kuba, the “bearers of storms.” He goes to great pains to search out the power source of the sorcerers: “a crude twig box held together by dead vines and half covered with shards of broken mirrors attached by tar or pitch. Hidden inside was a hodgepodge of repellent animal, reptile and human viscera whose mysteries only the sorcerer could explain.”

Viscera, however, do not a novel make, and Tyler needs his own literary box to magic up a drama. And there’s no box, as Freud said, like the love box.

Enter the consul’s wife, Blakey Ogden, who shares Matthews’ fascination with the primitive.

Enter the consul, an unreflective stick, no match for Greene’s honorary consul or any of the more-dimensioned foreign service officers who have found themselves posted into a LeCarre-like thriller.

Still, it takes 125 pages for Matthews to climb into Blakey’s box, at which climactic point she utters a “soft cry . . . as much a cry of pain as of joy . . . like the cry of the stormy petrel I once heard beyond landfall crossing the Cabot Straits on a lonely, wind-swept sea and it went through me like a knife.”

A love that can barely stand the light of print cannot last long. Soon Matthews is cast across Africa, where not even the heat of revolution can release him from the torment of the memory of the consul’s wife. But what forgetfulness won’t cure can be safely left to the writer: Across the lonely, wind-swept sea, the skeptical diplomat finally returns home and bags his honorary petrel.

Yet it is in describing these emotional viscera that Tyler falls continents short of his heroes. The greatness in the writing of the best former spooks lies not in their details but in their humanity. Their gardens are full of people in all their hybrid complexities. Unfortunately, Tyler lacks a Greene thumb.