International Mischief
LEKACHMAN, ROBERT
International Mischief The Care of Time By Eric Ambler Farrar, Straus, Giroux. 277pp. $11.95. Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Eric Ambler is one of those writers -Graham Greene is another-in whose...
...Halliday bollixes up Zander's plans by conducting a virtuoso interview with the Ruler which reveals to any casual viewer that worthy's murderous psychosis...
...Zander and his daughter survive-not necessarily the best of ideas-and so does Halliday...
...A mysterious international middleman named Zander blackmails him-i cannot of course honorably disclose the technique-into assisting in the negotiation of a curious deal between nato and the "Ruler," never otherwise described, of an unidentified Persian Gulf emirate...
...Zander originally selected Halliday to assist him for two reasons: his old CIA associations, and his reputation as a third-rate television interviewer...
...Even in the' 30s Ambler had unusual feeling for character, nuance and atmosphere...
...Because the Ruler comes across as clinically insane as well as being faithful to his family's tradition of sadism, the nato brass are somewhat squeamish about acquiring a strategic harbor on the Ruler's horrible terms...
...The Ruler, Zander's employer, has engaged some international terrorists to assassinate the middleman, as Zander and his daughter, who doubles as chief of security, come to realize...
...Reviewed by Robert Lekachman Eric Ambler is one of those writers -Graham Greene is another-in whose company I have trudged into late middle life...
...Compared with the Erdmans, Hunts and Ludlums, Ambler is the Tolstoy of his genre...
...It is harder in the postwar world for Ambler and the rest of us to make moral judgments with the clarity of yore...
...More power to his pen, typewriter or word processor...
...One could always ignore the politics and pursue the ironies of the plot, usually under the guidance of a British leading character who was decent of disposition, a trifle slow of wit and totally uninstructed in the intricacies of European intrigue...
...Suffice it to say that now as is 1936 Ambler tells a good story...
...In elegant prose, he effectively sketches the sex and sadism that clumsier practitioners smear onto their pages like peanut butter...
...Like Ambler, I and probably many of his other readers find it increasingly difficult to discern virtue among NATO generals, CIA chiefs of staff, opec potentates, Russian diplomats, terrorists, or our own politicians...
...With luck, I shall be enjoying his interpretations of contemporary politics during the golden years of senior citizenship, should the Republicans see fit to finance them...
...Still, in the interest of world peace, they are not quite prepared to terminate the negotiation...
...I should not myself be portentous...
...Back in those good old Popular Front days, many serious people celebrated Stalin's 1936 Constitution as the most democratic in the universe and debated the guilt or innocence of the old Bolsheviks on display in Moscow show trials...
...There are the inevitable complications...
...Since Ambler spares us Greene's theological portentousness, his characters frequently mingle good and evil without benefit of clergyThe protagonist of The Care of Time is a recognizable Ambler type, a reasonably prosperous ghostwriter named Halliday who indulges in complicated scruples about the sorts of people he will spiritually assist...
...As a result, other Persian Gulf rulers arrange to install the Ruler in an insane asylum and replace him with a presumably more rational successor...
...some of Ambler's villains continue to be capitalists, but others are Third World strongmen and Soviet operatives...
...The heroes of his prewar novels were usually Russian secret agents, the villains a noisome assortment of thugs in the employ of international oil, Balkan fascists, Turkish police officials, and veterans of Black and Tan atrocities in Ireland...
...American public television has a brief opportunity to air the interview, but under pressure from a major contributor, a large oil company with major investments in the Ruler's part of the world, public TV caves in...
...The story ends happily, in its way...
...In the past, he served a hitch with the CIA and, owing to his case officer's malfeasance, endured eight ghastly months in an Iraqi prison...
...The Ruler's deal falls through in pleasantly ironic fashion...
...Born in London in 1909, Ambler has served his long-distance followers as an index to respectable opinion on the moderate and slightly further Left...
...The current item is one of the best of the 14 thrillers this author has published since his classic trio of the 1930s, A Coffin for Dimitrious, Cause for Alarm and Background to Danger...
...In this morality play, no one comes out quite clean...
Vol. 64 • September 1981 • No. 18
