Books: In Out of the Cold War

THE ANTI-DEATH LEAGUE by Kingsley Amis. 307 pages. Harcourt, Brace. $5.95.

IT’S A FREE COUNTRY by Leonard Brain. 192 pages. Coward-McCann. $4.50.

THE STATESMAN’S GAME by James Aldridge. 309 pages. Doubleday. $4.95.

Three spy novels that came in out of the cold war raise questions beyond the mere mechanics of this kind of fiction.

They are each by an English writer, and the English have excelled at this kind of thing since Doyle, Buchan and Oppenheim foiled the foreign malefactors. But something has happened to the genre since those simple times when everybody knew who the enemy was. Eric Ambler led a school during the United Front period of the ’30s with wonderfully atmosphered thrillers in which the heroes, or their allies, were Soviet security men.

These three novels might be described as documents of the vague and nervous neutralism to which Britain’s intellectuals incline, a neutralism in which the villain is just as likely to be the CIA or MI-5 as the KGB, or in which the security system itself is made an object of loathing and derision. Precisely because they are popular, such books may indicate a state of mind. Together they may suggest a trend of British thought in marked divergence from that of the U.S.

∙The Anti-Death League is knowledgeable, or perhaps merely confident, about security and also about such matters as psychoanalysis, theology, homosexuality and alcoholism. The story begins in a private mental hospital, where mixed-up army officers are vetted, but the focus shifts to a nearby military installation engaged on a sinister project known as Operation Apollo. Kingsley Amis, whose The James Bond Dossier shows a theoretical as well as a practical interest in secret agentry, plays fair with the reader. Atomic rifle ammunition for issue rifles seems to be the secret of Apollo; the suspected leaks include a friendly neighborhood nymphomaniac, a particularly nasty psychiatrist, an alcoholic-homosexual and the chaplain, who is a devout atheist. Amis keeps the reader looking in the wrong direction until the highly sophisticated and almost credible solution. By this time, one thing is clear. Apollo is really a cover for an even more dreadful military weapon—germ warfare. As a terror deterrent to the Red Chinese, the British have developed a technique for transmitting rabies to an enemy army. It is too much for one of the officers (unduly sensitive to such questions, as his beloved broad has just been diagnosed for cancer), who would maybe like to join a way-outfit called the Anti-Death League. This is an intelligent man’s nightmare, with the famous Amis wit flickering as an unkindly light amid the encircling gloom.

∙It’s a Free Country, disguised as a thriller, is a fable that might have been concocted by an unusually simple-minded fellow traveler. The villain of the piece is the British security system, which is apparently feeble enough to let a Burgess and Maclean, a Philby or Vassall, go undetected for years, but is eager to winkle out a man of the people of leftist leanings who just happens to handle sensitive hardware. He is a noble, rugged, beer-drinking type who had fought against Hitler and Franco, and his consort is a very nice schoolteacher married to someone else. The jilted husband sets Security on the coup!e. It is a setup calculated to have the bleachers cheering as the pro-Communist pair outwit the villainous security men. The proletarian hero investigates the investigators and exposes his three persecutors as 1) the husband of a convicted shoplifter and father of a reefer-drag ging beatnik son, 2) a collector of fancy ceramics specializing in Victorian toilet bowls, and 3) a queer.

∙The Statesman’s Game is a glum and pretentious fantasy written in humorless prose about Rupert Royce, a British shipping tycoon who has fallen in love with the Soviet Union and shows signs of a second love affair with Red China.

It is the sequel to another Aldridge novel, A Captive in the Land, about the same enlightened multimillionaire who had been made Hero of the Soviet Union after dragging a paralyzed Russian explorer to safety over an incredible distance of polar ice. Has he been brainwashed? The sinister Admiral Lille, chief of naval intelligence, seems to think so, and the reader may well decide, despite Aldridge, that the old sea dog is right. There is a great deal of top-level muckraking about the malevolent moral dwarfs who operate international finance-capitalism; it is possibly the least convincing stuff since Upton Sinclair’s Lanny Budd went crusading for a better world amid the corrupt chancelleries of Europe.

The fastest-selling new spy thriller in the U.S., already on the bestseller lists, is The Kremlin Letter, by Noel Behn (284 pages; Simon & Schuster; $4.95). It raises no serious questions at all, except perhaps about taste. Faced with the espionage writer’s inevitable decision of choosing between Ian Fleming’s rollicking escapism and John le Carre’s gritty realism, Author Behn, a onetime off-Broadway producer who served for two years in the U.S. Army’s counter-intelligence corps, cops out. The result is a pop horror comic about a mission to Moscow by a team of freelance operatives: a sadistic rapist, a dehumanized naval officer, a pimp, a homosexual, and a beautiful young girl who is not only an electronics genius but can tie knots in a string with her toes. The best thing about the book is that readers get a slight sporting chance. After Chapter 4, they are offered a choice of breaking a paper seal and going on, or returning the book with the seal unbroken and getting their money back. Cop out.