The Red Fox/First Loyalty
Lourie, Richard & Hyde, Anthony
THE RED FOX Anthony Hyde/Alfred A. Knopf/$17.95 FIRST LOYALTY Richard Lourie/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$17.95 Cynthia Grenier n these days of treason chic, when the Guy Burgesses and other...
...The final line of the book belongs to Vaska meditating on his disgrace: "He had seen the truth and it would kill him...
...It's very simple: a Communist is that person who can most skillfully justify the greatest number of the murdered dead...
...While Hyde's gifts for character and political perception are undeniable, one would now like to see him use these talents in a serious, non-genre novel...
...While giving us all the usual trappings of a thriller∔suspense, high adventure, violence, vivid descriptions of cities as diverse as Detroit and Leningrad∔Hyde is a serious novelist with a serious story to tell...
...Except Hitler, of course, I wondered if that wasn't the most enduring legacy of the Nazis: their horrors had become a virtually limitless excuse for the lesser horrors of the others...
...These certainly constitute a promising couple of straws in the wind...
...I Interestingly enough, September also saw the publication of another novel, First Loyalty, by Richard Lourie, which combines an equally clear-eyed view of the ways of the Soviet Union and some high-thriller elements...
...As a dissident writer in the West, Vaska hopes, the poet will become a media star, then request repatriation and eventually write a book denouncing the West...
...The narrator reflects: These former beliefs, however briefly held, may nonetheless have been the only beliefs he'd ever had in his life...
...Undoubtedly, I can still murder and maim, but I could no longer justify it∔I've lost the greatest skill I could once claim to possess...
...Pick him out of a crowd...
...Fair enough as plot devices go, and Vaska as the modern Soviet bureaucrat∔not stupid but trapped within the system∔is nicely conceived...
...Let me tell you...
...Unfortunately, Lourie decides to enrich his tale by introducing a formula for longevity developed by a Soviet scientist who wants to smuggle it out to the West, which provokes rather more convolutions of the plot than the characters are ready to bear...
...What makes the discovery doubly exciting is the fact that The Red Fox is a main selection of the Literary Guild and is about to be published in fifteen other countries...
...Which means there is every reason to expect that Anthony Hyde's penetrating analysis of how idealistic men became traitors to the societies that nurtured them is going to reach a singularly wide readership...
...Perhaps the most perceptive comment in the book comes from the long disillusioned Brightman on the run: Do you know what a Communist is, Mr...
...Thorne...
...How can you spot him...
...Which makes me a failed Communist...
...The Red Fox revolves around a suspenseful treasure hunt for millions in gold certificates stashed away by a former Soviet spy master, Harry Brightman, who late in life has finally met his Kronstadt...
...however,] the British couldn't give [Stalin] half of Poland, Latvia, Estonia, all the rest of it∔but the Nazis could and that was the key...
...Like Hyde, Lourie, a Fellow at the Russian Research Center at Harvard, has an intimate knowledge of the world's principal totalitarian power...
...Brightman as a character is, shall we say, "inspired" by the likes of Armand Hammer, or Hammer's father, a man who has become a millionaire, trading first in furs with the Soviets in the early post-Revolution days, who has paid the price for his beliefs and wealth by long years of enforced treason, and who now seeks "only to live out my life with no more shame than I already feel...
...That was why he loved Hitler so dear and turned over the German and Polish CPs to the Gestapo...
...But in a sense they serve to set off all the better Hyde's lucid analysis of the standard collection of pro-Soviet apologetics...
...As a first novel, it does have its awkwardnesses and moments of implausibility∔no more, to be sure, than most exemplars of the genre...
...He has a splendid appraisal of the Hitler-Stalin pact: Cynthia Grenier, formerly of the New York Times, is a movie producer...
...Knopf is giving a major push to The Red Fox and Harcourt Brace Jovano-vich is taking out full page ads in the Sunday New York Times Book Review for First Loyalty∔two genuine if somewhat flawed novels which examine the true nature of the totalitarian state...
...47...
...Can a new trend be aborning...
...Hyde paints a brilliantly damning portrait of an American foreign service officer in retirement, conjured up in some degree no doubt by a Michael Straight or an Alger Hiss, a man now spiritually bereft...
...American civilization failed to supply its citizens with anything more than an astonishing flow of goods and services, thereby alienating its intellectuals, one of whom happens on a lucky find that promises to put excitement and meaning in his life...
...Today, even if he thought them ridiculous, he might have nothing else to fall back on...
...THE RED FOX Anthony Hyde/Alfred A. Knopf/$17.95 FIRST LOYALTY Richard Lourie/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$17.95 Cynthia Grenier n these days of treason chic, when the Guy Burgesses and other traitors of yesterday are being treated with a kind of gentle indulgence∔as witness Another Country, Pack of Lies, The Jigsaw Man, An Englishman Abroad, The Human Factor∔it is exciting to discover a novel, The Red Fox, whose very essence is an examination, and condemnation, of idealistic Westerners who spy for totalitarian governments...
...At the end of the adventure, the embittered disinformation officer, Vaska, thinks over his elaborate scheme, which has failed: Shar had told Vaska that Aronow was one of those Western intellectuals who were too smart for their own good, and had ended up needing a reason to live...
...Sometimes you hear people say it was the fault of the French or the British, that they wouldn't do a deal with the Bolshevik so he had to fall in with Hitler...
...For the needs of his plot, he takes a Soviet poet modeled rather wickedly on Yevgeny Yevtushenko (even giving him the same first name), and turns him into a young lieutenant of the KGB manipulated by Vaska, head of a branch of the KGB's department of disinformation, who contrives to "expel" the poet...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
