THE TORQUED MAN

An Irish double agent and his German handler form an unlikely bond in 1940s Berlin.

When ex–Irish resistance fighter Proinnsias “Frank” Pike is liberated from a Spanish prison in 1940 by German intelligence operative Adrian de Groot, aka Johann Grotius, the ill-matched duo are launched on a daring series of exploits inside Nazi Germany. Debut novelist Mann seamlessly intertwines two narratives—de Groot’s candid journal and a third-person account of Pike’s escapades entitled “Finn McCool in the Bowels of Teutonia” (his alter ego is a well-known hunter/warrior figure in Irish mythology)—to describe some of the same events from their wildly differing perspectives. De Groot, a philologist and translator and the titular torqued man (another sly nod to Irish myth), recruits Pike to engage in missions intended to turn Ireland’s ancient antipathy to England into full-fledged support for Hitler’s regime, but the Germans are a step behind the English, who intend to take advantage of Pike’s presence in the heart of the Reich’s war machine to thwart these schemes and serve their own ends. Once Pike, whose “man of action” bravado and “gregarious and libidinous personality” contrast sharply with de Groot’s intellectual diffidence, is transported to the heart of Berlin, he embarks on a devilishly clever “assassination-and-mayhem campaign” designed to decimate the upper ranks of the German medical profession, with the goal of eventually eliminating Hitler himself. More suited to scholarship than spycraft, de Groot finds that his attempts to bring order to the “perpetual misadventure that life with Pike would come to entail” are complicated by an intense personal affection for his charge. Mann’s brisk and well-constructed plot is enhanced by equally impressive prose that succeeds in making the inner lives of his principal characters as engaging as Pike’s often hair-raising (if occasionally ill-conceived) deeds.

A wily spy novel with a human touch.