A novel can, and should, do many things, but a thriller need do only one. If it thrills, it succeeds, and if it does not, no matter how well it does everything else, it fails. Alex Berenson’s third novel, “The Silent Man,” succeeds in seizing the attention from the start and never letting go until the end.

I might want to argue with the first two sentences, or at least quibble a bit, but I think the review is right when it comes to Berenson’s latest book.

As we have discussed in our reviews of the previous John Wells novels (The Faithful Spy and The Ghost War), John Wells started out with an interesting hook (first Western spy to infiltrate Al Quada, convert to Islam, etc.) but hasn’t much developed beyond all round tough guy super spy.  Not that he is a particularly one dimensional for the genre, just that he is typical of the genre.

What Berenson does well is set up a plausible terrorist attack or military threat and then start the clock on Wells’s attempt to keep it from happening.  As the story plays out the pace quickens and the tension rises.  And Berenson gives the reader the view from all sides; inside and out of the plot – minor and major characters.  In the end you know Wells will save the day, but you don’t know how and how many people will die in between.

This time the focus is on a plot to smuggle a  nuclear bomb into America and detonate it for maxim damage: at the State of the Union address.  Character depth aside, Berenson again delivers an entertaining high stakes action thriller.

Berenson starts the plot off with the acquisition of the warheads from a facility in the former Soviet Union and traces the plot all the way to upstate New York where three men are working to convert the material into a workable bomb. Wells is tied into this plot via his connection with  another reoccurring character: Pierre Kowalski an international arms dealer.  Wells had earlier humiliated Kowalski by duct taping his head after getting the information he needed about who was funding the training of the Taliban in Afghanistan.  Kowalksi vowed revenge.

His attempt at revenge is thwarted by Wells but not before his lover, Jennifer Exley,  is critically injured.  This attack also strains their relationship to the breaking point as Well is intent on revenge while Exley wants a life beyond the CIA.

As in the last book, this tension, and Wells’s self-doubt, gets tiresome.  Berenson can’t pull off the emotional depth and so the interpersonal aspects just slow the story down.  It is as if Berenson wants Wells to be more than a James Bond type but can’t quite pull it off.

But these interludes are really just a small part of the book so the intrusion is minimal.  The interesting thing about Wells is that he seems to fall upward in many ways.  His chief skills is survival.  He is not suave and slick so much as cold, hard, and brutal (part of his self-doubt is the question of whether that is all he is).  He blunders in Moscow and his superiors distrust of his go-it-alone attitude undercuts him in Berlin.  But thanks to a deal with the hated Kowalski of all people he gets enough of a lead to track the plot to a farm in upstate New York.  The book ends with a highly suspenseful race between the terrorists – including one who is having second thoughts – and Wells.

As others has noted, Berenson brings a reporters eye for detail and story to his craft.  He may not have the literary sensibility and talents necessary to create deep and three dimensional characters but he sure can spin a thrilling yet plausible and convincing plot.

And as so many reviewers have noted, the books all leave you with an uncomfortable feeling because the threats all seem so real and all too possible.  The beauraucrats who seem to care more about defending their turf and reputations than about protecting America and saving lives.  The terrorists who thrive on grievances both real and imagined; historical and deeply personal.  The potentially soul destroying nature of intelligence and its neccissity in a dangerous world.  Berenson captures all of this with precision and uses it to power his plots.  Pulling that off is no mean feat.

So if you like thrillers that capture the threats and fears of today’s newspaper headlines Alex Berenson’s John Wells novels should be on your list.  If you haven’t started the series I recommend starting at the beginning.  If you have, be sure to check out The Silent Man.

Cover of The Ghost War

You had to think Alex Berenson felt a little pressure on his second book.  The first won an Edgar Award after all and ended with its hero saving New York City from a biological attack.  How to top that?

In The Ghost War Berenson continues the exploits of John Wells while mixing in a little more geopolitical tension.  Here is how Publishers Weekly describes it:

Having foiled an al-Qaeda plot targeting Times Square in 2006′s The Faithful Spy (which won an Edgar Award for best first novel), maverick CIA agent John Wells confronts a very different threat in this pulse-pounding sequel from New York Times reporter Berenson. When the CIA’s efforts to extract Dr. Sung Kwan, a North Korean scientist and an invaluable source on Kim Jong Il’s nuclear ambitions, result in the deaths of Kwan and the rescue team, Wells’s significant other, Jennifer Exley, searches to identify the person in U.S. intelligence who compromised Kwan’s security. Meanwhile, Wells returns to Afghanistan, the scene of much of the action in The Faithful Spy, to find out what outside country has been helping the Taliban reassert itself. While the mole hunt will be familiar to genre buffs and the characters and the perils they face aren’t as nuanced as those in John le Carré or even David Ignatius, the author’s plausible scenario distinguishes this from most spy thrillers.

If the first book was focused on the character of Wells, the second book is propelled more by the looming conflict between China and the US.  It also introduces the stress and strains involved in the relationship between Wells and Exley.

Berenson continues to give you a variety of perspectives as you see the action through the eyes of multiple characters.  As the plot points touched on by PW above reveal, he builds up a series of seemingly unrelated but ultimately interconnected threats and/or plot threads.  North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, and China all play a part.

But the big picture is China.  The tension builds as Berenson lays out a plausible scenario whereby the US and China could find themselves on the brink of war.

More below.Robert Kaplan notes the strengths and weakness of Berenson well in his NYT review of The Ghost War.  First, the good:

In “The Ghost War,” the New York Times reporter Alex Berenson has fashioned a smart, economically written spy novel that imagines a future clash with the Chinese. As such, it’s a novel for policy wonks, with a very sophisticated vision of how a conflict with China could come about, akin to the kind of war-gaming scenarios that occupy Washington strategists.

[. . .]

The plot moves quickly, in tight, essayistic paragraphs that show Berenson’s command of such disparate worlds as the United States Navy and Chinese migrant workers. I once spent a month aboard a destroyer in the Pacific and can attest to the accuracy of the author’s portrayal of one. His description of a semi-starving Chinese laborer who starts a riot, and whose only memory of home and his dead parents is a baseball hat that a policeman grabs from him, is vivid and moving.

And then the not so good:

Like many novels of this genre, “The Ghost War” is too mechanical in its plot and lacks the baroque character development for which John le Carré is famous. The protagonist, a Central Intelligence Agency officer named John Wells, is a two-dimensional variation of derring-do types common to other spy books. (Much more successful is Berenson’s study of the American mole, Keith Robinson, whose family tragedy leads him in stages to betray his country.) Moreover, the lavish descriptions of military technicalities can sometimes be distracting from the plot and the characters themselves. But Berenson is not trying to be le Carré. Rather, he displays a reporter’s fine awareness of headlines over the horizon.

How much you want to bet Berenson is tired of the le Carre thing?

But Kapaln, and PW, make a valid point.  Berenson’s books are not in the more literary vein of spy fiction.  They are geopolitical; reporting with a fictional thriller twist for entertainment.

John Wells had an interesting start as the first Western spy to infiltrate Al Qaeda, but he isn’t a particularly deep character.  I think Berenson makes up for this with what Kaplan calls “tight, essayistic paragraphs.”  The characters may lack depth but the story has a wide perspective and a pace that limits the harm.  The characters aren’t really the point so much as the larger story.  The fact that the big picture story fits together in a plausible and exciting way is what gives the books their force.

The climatic, twisting and turning ending of the first book set a high bar for its sequel.  And despite any minor quibbles or complaints, The Ghost War clearly cleared that hurdle in my opinion.  It has a unique and plausible plot with plenty of action and suspense.

As Kaplan notes, Berenson takes newspaper headlines and imagines how those tensions and conflict might play out behind the scenes.  The result is entertaining and even thought provoking.  So let’s leave le Carre out of it from now on.

The Faithful Spy: A Novel

I used to read a great deal of espionage thrillers.  I especially liked a series with a repeating central character.  In high school and college I used to devour them.  I would find an author I liked and read every book they had written.  There was somehing satisfying about being emersed in a series and a character.

These days my tastes are a little more eccelctic and I have a great deal less time.  No more going back and reading a newly discovered author’s backlist from the start.  This bugs me because I am the kind of person who likes to read a series in order for fear of missing some key fact or even just the more nuanced perspective you get from reading every book in a series or even in an author’s career.

But when Alex Berenson’s latest John Wells novel, The Silent Man, arrived at my door I felt like I needed to read the first two books before jumping in.  Thankfully it was only two books and they are quick reads.

Which brings us to the first book in the series, The Faithful Spy, which won the Edgar Award for a first novel in 2007.  If you like “ripped from the headlines” thrillers with a nice blend of action and geopolitical tension then The Faithful Spy is your kind of book.

Despite being firmly in the international/espionage thriller camp, Berenson brings a great deal of plausibility to his plots and depth to his characters.  They are fast and entertaining reads.

More below.

As this is the first book in the series, Berenson’s first job is to introduce the character of John Wells.  And he is an interesting character for sure.  America’s first spy inside Al Qaeda and yet a man disconnected from his country and not trusted by his superiors.

Due to the nature of the job, and perhaps to his own personality, Wells disappeared for years while he sought to gain the trust of Al Qaeda.  A great deal happened while he was behind enemy lines: his parents died, his wife moved on and remarried; the terrorists struck on 9/11; and Wells converted to Islam.  Despite 9/11, or because of it, Wells is driven to find a way to destroy the terrorist groups leadership.  And then suddenly he is chosen by Bin Ladin’s No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri for an assignment in the US.

When Wells connects with his superiors at the CIA, however, he finds only suspicion and distrust.  But Wells is determined to stop this new plot from the inside even if he has to do it without the CIA.

Clearly his contact, Omar Khadri, is planning something big and Wells is at the heart of it.  But Khadri seems to hold all the cards and Wells isn’t sure he can retain the trust of the terrorists long enough to stop them; before another devastating 9/11 type failure.

For a first time author Berenson does a number of things well:

• He does a nice job of developing his characters; both central and peripheral.  Each character is set up with a background  and perspective – through vignettes and internal dialogs – that give the reader insight into their mindset as they play their part in the overall story.  This give the novel some depth that thrillers often lack; a sense that you are seeing the story from all sides as it plays out.
• Wells’ Islamic conversion experience in Afghanistan adds a nice element of tension.  Wells is sympathetic to Muslim complaints and understands the beauty of their faith but still opposes the terrorists with every fiber in his being.  It adds another element of outsiderness to his personality as well.
• Berenson works in contemporary issues into the story but not with a heavy hand.  Iraq, terrorism, torture policy, US relations with the world, the bureaucratic nature of the CIA, and more are all touched upon but they provide a backdrop and context not an opportunity to lecture or preach.
• While there is plenty of thriller type action, the overall plot and storyline have a level of plausibility that is rare and frightening.  You never find yourself saying: “Oh, that is ridiculous.”  Instead, you worry that this type of thing is all too plausible.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of The Faithful Spy is the way Wells’ battle with Khadri develops.  Instead of the good guy relentlessly pursuing the bad guy you have a sort of deadly dance as each tries to outmaneuver the other while at the same time pretending to trust each other.  And even as the reader sees a much bigger picture than Wells, Berenson still has some twists and turns in store as the plot races to the finish.

If there is a drawback it is the tendency toward overwrought self-analysis by Wells (and others).  I am sure Berenson is trying to bring some emotional depth to go with his action but it can come off as a little much at times.  But who am I to say what it must feel like to match wits and violence with international terrorists and not lose your soul?

But The Faithful Spy deserves the praise it has received.  It really is a classic of the genre; a sort of worst nightmare brought to life in a gripping and entertaining fashion.  If you love international thrillers with plots seemingly ripped from the headlines and you haven’t yet read Berenson’s John Wells series be sure to check them out.