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Review
‘Displaying once again Wilson’s gifts for atmospheric depiction of place, this ambitious experiment is streets ahead of most other thrillers’ John Dugdale, Sunday Times
‘With Company of Strangers Wilson again shows himself to be one of our finest writers and a storyteller with few equals’ Jim Driver, Time Out
‘Wilson employs a slightly out-of-focus prose style that eminently suits his tale of intrigue and double-dealing … watch his star, for it is surely in the ascendent’ Vincent Banville, Irish Times
‘Wilson’s tale is a plotter’s delight: spanning several decades and cleverly reworking past narratives in the light of new evidence, he creates an intriguing moral maze for his heroine to negotiate – and a puzzle of metaphors to match (he’s a better stylist than du Maurier). Recommended’ Chris Petit, Guardian
‘A big, meaty novel of love and deceit … with this novel Wilson vaults to the front-rank of thriller writers’ Peter Guttridge, Observer
Product Description
Stunning European-based thriller from an acclaimed young British author: ‘A class act’ – Sunday Times; ‘First in a field of one’ – Literary Review
Lisbon 1944. In the torrid summer heat, as the streets of the capital seethe with spies and informers, the endgame of the Intelligence war is being silently fought.
Andrea Aspinall, mathematician and spy, enters this sophisticated world through a wealthy household in Estoril. Karl Voss, military attaché to the German Legation, has arrived embittered by his implication in the murder of a Reichsminister and traumatized by Stalingrad, on a mission to rescue Germany from annihilation. In the lethal tranquility of this corrupted paradise they meet and attempt to find love in a world where no-one can be believed.
After a night of extreme violence, Andrea is left with a lifelong addiction to the clandestine world that leads her from the brutal Portuguese fascist régime to the paranoia of Cold War Germany, where she is forced to make the final and the hardest choice.
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Customer Reviews
More than half the novel consists of this Anne/Karl story during the waning days of World War II, a tightly drawn, tension-filled, and often genuinely moving interplay of characters and the forces which motivate them. Part II further develops the story of Anne in 1968 in London, with the short Part III taking place in 1989. These latter two sections, while intriguing and consistent with the author's themes, seemed to me to lack the immediacy and excitement of the earlier Lisbon section. The broad scope and intensity of World War II are sacrificed in favor of subtler, more abstract maneuvering during the Cold War in Part II. The motivations of the characters are fuzzier, the consequences of their behavior seem less cataclysmic, and what action there is feels a bit arthritic. The concluding Part III narrows the scope even more to a handful of characters in a country cottage setting, and while it is dramatic and probably realistic, I found it disappointing--as if the author himself were performing some double agent trickery on me, the reader.
Like the best of the espionage novels, this one has plenty of action and excitement to keep the reader occupied, especially in Part I, but the book also seems to straddle a line. Because the author is also intent on developing character over an extended period of time, an unusual objective in a thriller, he also needs to include the less exciting Parts II and III which show the characters in their maturity and bring the story and themes full circle, an unusual structure and a fascinating attempt by the author to "have it all." Mary Whipple
The time line will take you from London of WWII, to the dawning of Glasnost in The Soviet Union, with stops in Berlin East and West, Lisbon and other locales. The book is about spies, very human, not the 007 Hollywood varieties. The motivation of why they work for a cause or country, what may make them turn, and sometimes turn once again is beautifully written and marvelously complex. The writer explores what takes place when an agent during a war finds that the country he once served, or perhaps betrayed, once the war concludes is now in the enemy's camp. Who is his new master, who does he deceive this time if deception is the choice? Does an agent serving a foreign power that becomes the victor continue to serve, or are the ideals he thought were being served proving to have been a fraud and new choices are made?
The agents that take center stage in this book are all presented in various levels of detail, however none are vague. In the midst of the wild swings in world politics a variety of people have their beliefs confirmed, betrayed, and have their personal motives subjected to doubt. Do they spy as an act of revenge, a perceived wrong that was inflicted, is the spying based on theology, or is it monetary, or is it the game itself that is the attraction?
In addition to all that I have mentioned, there is much more, and there are few authors who could carry out the complexity of plot without it become cloudy, and he includes revelations that in most hands would be cliché© at best, and more than likely laughable.
'The Company Of Strangers', does not wind down as the end arrives. The author literally brings his story to the conclusion on the final page. Mr. Wilson also has not succumbed to churning out work and presenting it in a brief and incomplete manner. He takes all the time he needs, and if that requires the better part of 500 pages, that is what he uses. You have the sense that you are reading exactly what the writer intended. His goal was to produce a great book, not a shallow utilitarian read, written with an eye toward a screenplay, or any other secondary use.
This man is a brilliant writer; I recommend his work without condition.
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