A TIME TO FORGET IN EAST BERLIN

A spy with a difficult past finds love in Fewston’s second espionage novel in a series.

According to a 30-something American by the name of John Lockwood, everyone living in East Berlin in 1975 could be summed up in just a sentence or two—“and they were, by the Stasi.” John’s come to the Communist region to do some spying of his own, although he keeps his objectives close to the vest, even from the reader. Using the name Jacob Miller, he’s on the trail of the shadowy Heads of Leonidas, a covert organization he’s been tracking since he was in Tehran. Now he’s in a divided city at the center of the Cold War, and his task is a lonely one: He watches people from a distance, but his personal interactions are mostly limited to other spies with suspect motivations. Then he meets two people who seem especially interested in him. The first is his 20-year-old neighbor, Nina Rosenberg, who manages to talk her way into his apartment shortly after a dead body is found in the neighborhood. The other is a philosophical old man named Zehrfeld who reveals himself to know far more about John’s past than any stranger should. Nina is boldly critical of East Germany—she blames the government for both her parents’ deaths—and she shares John’s tastes in literature. She also promises to inject some passion into his life, but she’s much younger than he is, and he’s reluctant to drag her into his dangerous world; meanwhile, Zehrfeld is angling to make a deal with John—and when it comes to both love and spycraft, John has trouble saying no.

Despite its status as a sequel (with a third novel planned), this tale of John’s East Berlin mission works rather well as a stand-alone tale. Memories of John’s previous adventures occasionally intrude on the present-day action, but far less so than one might expect. Overall, this is a mood piece with limited fixations, and as such, it delivers more than the usual cloak-and-dagger intrigue of thrillers set during the Cold War. However, the novel is poorly served by Fewston’s prose, which often comes across as excessively melodramatic, as in this passage, in which John describes his first night with Nina: “Like the gods who forgot they had lived, Nina and I talked late into the night. When it started raining around two in the morning, I should’ve known then the rain was a portent of things to come.” And although Fewston resists spy-novel clichés in other areas, several characters frustratingly talk as if they’re auditioning for a James Bond film, as when one says, “I’ve always admired Faust. At least he had ambition, a vision, a goal.” (There are several more references to Goethe’s classic story over the course of the novel.) The plot ultimately descends into similar theatricality, and the ending is unsatisfying—and despite the frequent literary allusions and philosophical tête-à-têtes, the novel leaves readers with disappointingly little to think about.

A promising espionage novel that suffers from its own self-seriousness.