Author Joseph Kanon’s Istanbul
Passage is a fine thriller, full of the intrigue of espionage and the
attendant moral quandaries that the best writers in the field, Greene, Ambler,
and Le Carre, do so well. Set in post-WWII Istanbul, the Second World War has
only recently ended, but already the intrigues of the Cold War have commenced.
Germany and Eastern Europe have unearthed not only Jewish refugees hoping for a
secure future by passing to Palestine (then a British protectorate), but also war
criminals, some of whom know things valuable to the U.S., the Soviets, and maybe even the Turks, who are caught between the two new superpowers.
The central character is an expatriate American businessman
turned sometime spy. Leon Bauer is mostly a courier, but then on “one last
mission” things go astray. Far astray. Now Leon, who speaks Turkish and knows
his way around the famed city, must use wits and guile that he’d never had to
use before to try to turn things toward . . . what? Leon isn’t just presented
with issues of tactics, but some troubling moral questions, too. Whom is he
helping? Who’s trying to get him? Why should he help a likely war criminal?
Besides the atmospherics of Istanbul and Ottoman intrigue, Kanon keeps his
readers wondering about what will happen next, whom to trust not to
trust, and what Leon can do to preserve some sense of moral rectitude that we
know that he seeks.
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| #JLF 2013 speaker Kanon whom I heard in Durbar Hall. Thanks again, JLF! |
I was a little reluctant about this book because I’d seen a
film version of this book, The Good German which didn’t work for me (or many
other viewers either, it seems). But while the film didn’t work for a variety
of reasons, I know now how the book could. Kanon has staked out an era (the
immediate post-war) that is fertile for intrigue and moral quandaries, much as
Le Carre did with the Cold War and Alan Furst (with less moral tension) in the immediate
pre-war and early war period. He’s worth another read.
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