Occupation: Spy:
CANTARELLA, HELENE
Occupation: Spy A Noble Profession. By Pierre Boulle. Vanguard. 255 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Hélène Cantarella Contributor, "Atlantic Monthly," New York "Times Book Review" Pierre Boulle needs...
...War is war...
...Pierre Boulle's...
...If "the ideal agent is someone who possesses a will of iron, subordinated to intellectual faculties of the first order," Cousin seems to fall desperately short of even minimum requirements...
...The hazards of war help him to cover up his failure...
...Thus when Pierre Boulle talks of war and espionage it is with the authority of long and intimate personal experience...
...In the bargain, Cousin's favorite protagonist is himself...
...But the stark realities of life as a secret agent prove to be very different from Cousin's idle fabrications and delusions...
...In the end, Fog's rash confidence is justified...
...His second assignment, ironically enough with Morvan's sister Claire as his assistant, brings Cousin's career to a terrifying climax...
...Boulle's new book opens with Dr...
...The dangers inherent in having this addict to "dreams of glory" do not daunt Fog...
...Cousin is a novelist with "a tendency to subordinate facts to the figment of his imagination...
...When he and Morvan are captured by the Germans, Cousin freezes in the face of danger and coldly sacrifices the heroic Morvan not only to save his own skin but to keep intact his own fictitious image of himself...
...Captured in 1943, he made his escape in 1944 and served with the Special Force in Calcutta until the end of hostilities...
...Called up in the French forces in Indo-China when World War II broke out, he joined the Free French in Singapore after the collapse of France and returned to Indo-China as a guerrilla fighter...
...The reader, made privy to information denied even the seemingly omniscient Fog, is frankly dismayed...
...To paraphrase the appropriate if hackneyed Machiavellian mot: The ends have justified the means...
...In this often brilliant, always absorbing and blood-chilling story, the "noble profession" which he is concerned with is that "occupation for gentlemen," intelligence work...
...Reviewed by Hélène Cantarella Contributor, "Atlantic Monthly," New York "Times Book Review" Pierre Boulle needs little or no introduction since he is the author of the novel The Bridge Over the River Kwai which inspired the fabulously successful movie of the same name...
...Fully qualified agents are not easy to come by...
...full-length portrait is limned with enormous skill...
...Cousin gets the job and is parachuted behind the lines in France with a French radio operator, Morvan...
...Fog, a British Intelligence psychiatrist, deciding after initial misgivings to hire Lieutenant Cousin, a French officer who has escaped to England after the fall of France...
...Originally trained as an engineer, Boulle went to Malaya in 1936 where he became a rubber planter...
...Clever, plausible, swift and hair-raising, it is a superior psychological mystery drama...
...Cousin lives up to his own ideal image and serves the purpose for which he had been hired...
...Trapped by the German agent whom he is sent to contact, Cousin is threatened with the incontrovertible proof of his betrayal of Morvan...
...No Lawrence of Arabia, he...
Vol. 44 • January 1961 • No. 3
