Legends by
Robert Littell
hbk out July 05
Published by Duckworth
at £14.99
Martin Odum is a troubled man (run that name, for a start, through an internet anagram programme). He is Russian-speaking, ex-CIA, and once a man of many ‘legends’ (or identities), one or two of which he may have mislaid. Indeed, so completely has he identified with his pseudonyms, he is undergoing treatment for possible multiple personality disorder. Currently Odum ekes out a living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, tending bees and, as a private detective, getting many of his clients (‘mahjongg debts…angry wives’) because he keeps nodding when they ‘can’t come up with the right word in English and wind up speaking Russian’. Everything he knows about being a detective comes from Humphrey Bogart. Everything he knows about being an ex-CIA agent however comes from Robert Littell, the award-winning espionage writer of The Defection of A.J. Lewinter (1973), The Amateur (1981), The Once and Future Spy (1990) and The Company (2002), Littell’s best-selling epic novel ‘of the CIA’. Guarantees of a great read rarely come more solid.
Odum’s latest employer, the sympathetically drawn Stella Kastner, is Jewish with a Russian speaking father, and an unhappy half-sister whose Russian-speaking husband, Samat Ugor-Zhilov, has ‘gone AWOL’ and whose presence is required in Jewish law before the sister can obtain the divorce necessary for her to resume her life. Odum is reluctant to take the case, until he is warned off in classic fashion by his ex-boss, whereupon he experiences, not just a change of mind, but ‘a change of heart’.
Thus begins this devilishly playful book (‘dissimulation: concealment, misrepresentation, disguise’) an inspired improvisation by an author at the peak of his form, on themes both pre- and post-Cold War. For what starts out as a missing person case soon turns into a globe-trotting search for identity, not only of Odum’s own and that of the elusive Samat, but practically every person Odum meets. ‘For who amongst us is the man he appears to be?’
The book weaves back and forth between the present (1997) and the past. As Odum presses forward with his investigation to Israel, Prague and Moscow (amongst others), he is confronted by evidence of his previous activities: in Lebanon with Hezbollah as Dante Pippen, the IRA bomber from Castletownbere, County Cork, in a Paraguayan border town as Lincoln Dittmann, an arms dealer and expert (to the point of clairvoyance) on the American Civil War. It’s a fast-moving narrative, dark-hearted and dark-humoured, continually offbeat and surprising. And, at the book’s conclusion, as you ‘walk back the cat’ in time-honoured Littell fashion, you realise just how meticulously it has all been structured.
“There are people at Langley who do nothing but stare at satellite downloads from morning to night…” remarks a key character high up in the CIA towards the end of this remarkable novel - “Hell of a way to run an espionage agency.” A timely reminder from Littell of how it should be done, certainly in fiction, and in all probability, in real life too.
Legends by
Robert Littell
