The Company

February 18, 2002
This impressive doorstopper of a book is like a family historical saga, except that the family is the American intelligence community. It has all the appropriate characters and tracks them over 40 years: a rogue uncle, the Sorcerer, a heavy-drinking chief of the Berlin office in the early Cold War days; a dashing hero, Jack McAuliffe, who ages gracefully and never loses his edge; a dastardly turncoat, who for the sake of the reader will not be identified here, but who dies nobly; a dark genius, the real-life James Jesus Angleton, who after the disclosure that an old buddy, British spy Kim Philby, had been a Russian agent all along, became a model of paranoia; a Russian exchange student who starts out with our heroes at Yale but then works for "the other side"; and endless assorted ladyfolk, wives, girlfriends and gutsy daughters—who are not portrayed with anything like the gritty relish of the men. Littell, an old hand at the genre (he wrote the classic The Defection of A.J. Lewinter) keeps it all moving well, and there are convincing set pieces: the fall of Budapest, the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba and an eerily prescient episode in Afghanistan, in which a character obviously modeled on Osama bin Laden appears, accompanied by a sidekick whose duty is to slay him instantly if his capture by the West seems imminent. It's gung-ho, hard-drinking, table-turning fun, even if a little old-fashioned now that we have so many other problems to worry about than the Russians—but it brings back vividly a time when they seemed a real threat. There are some breathtaking real-life moments with the Kennedy brothers, and with a bumbling Reagan, and with Vladimir Putin, now the leader of Russia, who is here given a background that is extremely
shady. (Apr.)Forecast: The Afghanistan element will lend itself to handselling, but that will be only icing on the cake of Overlook's full-tilt publicity campaign, which will include national ad/promo, a TV/radio satellite tour and an author tour. Along with Littell's reputation among critics and spy-lit cognescenti, it should all add up to a breakout book with serious bestseller potential. And Overlook's planned reprinting in hardcover of all of Littell's work, beginning with
The Defection of A.J. Lewinter, should keep Littell's name in readers' minds for years to come.

Starred review from December 1, 2001
For readers enthralled by the phrase walking back the cat (also the title of one of Littell's previous thrillers), this hefty tome will be nirvana. Littell, whose spy thrillers have ensnared readers since 1973's The Defection of A.J. Lewinter, here turns his literary eye and rapier-sharp mind on the Central Intelligence Agency. Starting during the Berlin years in the deep freeze of the Cold War, Littell follows two generations of agents and administrators right up through the 1995 mole episode. He devotes one gut-wrenching segment to the CIA's efforts in Afghanistan in 1983, which will have heightened significance for today's readers. Using historic figures amplified by artfully drawn figments of his abundant imagination, Littell also dramatizes the internal feuds and cutbacks that left the CIA, already vulnerable on the moral knife edge of espionage, barely able to meet the challenges of a changing world. Gathering its power slowly, the novel accelerates as events become more and more familiar and current. This is a work of fiction, yet its scholarship and analysis are outstanding. Littell avoids the didactic in favor of wit, irony, and ambiguity. A sure winner for libraries of all types. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/01.] Barbara Conaty, Library of Congress

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2002
If le Carre is the Joyce of spy novelists, Littell is the Dickens. Le Carre's focus has always been internal--spying as a metaphorical search for identity. Littell, on the other hand, wants to represent the entire espionage landscape on his canvas, the social and political aspects as well as the psychological. He's done that superbly, from " The Defection of A. J. "Lewinter (1973) through " Walking Back the Cat "(1997), but never in as much detail as in this nearly 1,000-page magnum opus, the spy novel as epic. Seamlessly mixing real events and real people with the story of four fictional spies, Littell presents the history of the CIA, from postwar Berlin to the present. As we follow the intersecting careers of three Company agents and one KGB operative, we see the major events and personalities of the cold war from the inside: Kim Philby, the Hungarian revolution, the Bay of Pigs, Russia versus Afghanistan, the fall of the Soviet Union. As Littell tells it, the story of the cold war is an " Alice in Wonderland"-like saga of multiple U.S. fiascoes leading inexplicably to a most peculiar victory. Littell, like le Carre, understands the slippery moral slope on which all covert activity rests, but he retains a clear respect for the cunning and bravery of the men and women who live in the shadow world. Has America's post-cold war "softness" created a vulnerability to terrorism, or has the spy's "wilderness of mirrors" undermined our common humanity? Littell finds evidence for both positions in an utterly captivating novel that is as disturbing as it is awash in every kind of ambiguity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)