The Collaborators by Michael Idov

 

I have a very serious confession to make: I do not come along at all with classical spy writers, like Graham Greene or Le Carré. Especially Carré. Maybe because there is a certain level of intellectual meta-thinking to the spy entertainment that does not work for me. Maybe because both of them were actually a bit too much into the spy life therefore used to being allusive and rather reproducing realities mechanically.

I don´t think too much about those writers, but I had them on my mind a lot while reading The Collaborators by Latvia-born author and screenwriter Michael Idov. 

Only that The Collaborators is taking place in the tumult of post-Cold War, otherwise the USA and Russia do keep hunting their agents, some paying for the naive game of getting involved in internal Russian politics unaware of the real rules of the game. 

A Russian millionaire in the US may not be as death as it was assumed and a journalist who went deep into the state secrets dies poisoned after being released from a KGB-like interogation. The characters from The Collaborators are trying to find the truth or at least to reach more clarity, they are reflexive, thinking about moves and what went wrong, therefore the pace of the action may be slower but the results are shocking.

The book reflects very much the geopolitical world we are living, counting up as usual, the mistakes of the past, with a Russian presence at least as predominant as during the peaks of the Cold War. An interesting topic nevertheless not my favorite cup of literary spy tea. A matter of taste though, but I see this book as a good movie, maybe even better.

Rating: 3 stars