Istanbul Passage

March 12, 2012
As this tense, complex, and fascinating espionage novel opens, Leon Bauer is on the Bosphorus shoreline north of Istanbul, shivering in the dark, waiting to take custody of a mysterious passenger who is being smuggled from Romania. It is late 1945, and Europe is hastily transitioning from World War II to the cold war. Turkey, a noncombatant, has thrived as a neutral center of business and diplomacy, and now Istanbul is filled with defeated Germans and victorious Russians, blustery Americans, and resigned Turks and desperate Jews, all pursuing vital and divergent agendas. And, of course, spies.
This is the Istanbul in which American businessman Leon Bauer finds himself, having fled here with his German-Jewish wife, Anna, after Kristallnacht in 1938. Leon was unable to serve in the military, but he was resourceful, spoke German as well as Turkish, and before long an American operative asked him to do a favor, a simple courier job. And so Leon began to do his part, an amateur in a professional’s world.
The title, Istanbul Passage, operates on many levels. The main passage is that of the mystery passenger, a journey that forms the core of the suspenseful double-cross–filled plot. The mission is a disaster from the very first sentence of the book, and Leon struggles to make sense of the betrayals while also taking critical responsibility for this stranger’s life, for a man’s safe passage from his wartime identity to his postwar fate. Along the way, Leon must confront the duplicity of nearly everyone around him, a diverse cast of memorable characters with unclear and shifting alliances.
Another passage is that of Jews, from fear in Europe to new hope in Palestine. Although Turkey had been officially neutral during most of the war, unofficially Istanbul had been a center for human trafficking. This had been Anna’s chief concern: the life-or-death business of transporting refugees via unsafe boats through dangerous waters. But when one of these missions failed tragically, Anna sank into a fugue state and is now shuttered in a clinic, completely uncommunicative.
There’s also the passage as a geographical designation, and in this regard Kanon’s book is a swirling, impressionistic treat, a sensory feast on one of the most delectable cities in the world, the confluence of the Islamic and the Christian, the ancient and the contemporary, the Asian and the European (straddling the Bosphorus, it is the only city in the world on two continents). The descriptive passages, the period tourism, are transporting.
Finally, there’s Leon’s journey—rather, his many journeys—as protagonist. From a civilian to a spy to whatever will follow. From a temporary expat to a possibly permanent resident. From a blind patriot to an independent operator. From a happily married man to something else. From an idealist to a pragmatist. Istanbul Passage is a first-rate espionage novel, filled with complexity and thrills, but its greatest success may be in this much more universal literary exploration: how an ordinary man is transformed by extraordinary circumstances.
Chris Pavone is the author of the debut novel The Expats, on sale March 6 (Crown).

Starred review from April 1, 2012
In 1945 Istanbul, Allied veteran Leon Bauer is running spy missions under the cover of a U.S. tobacco-importing business. With the war over, U.S. operations are closing up shop in the neutral capital, but Leon has one last big job: to take possession of a Romanian defector in possession of important Russian secrets and get him flown to safety. The rub is the defector, Alexei, was involved in a heinous massacre of Jews four years earlier. Kanon (The Good German, 2001, etc.) extends his mastery of the period novel with this coiled tale of foreign intrigue. Though not much happens, plot-wise, in this dialogue-driven book, Leon hardly has a moment to relax, immersed in a world of moral and political upheaval. When he first arrived in Istanbul with his wife Anna, the city was a paradise with its scenic river view, cultural riches and feeling of mystery. Now, badly injured in an accident, Anna lives in a nursing home, awake but uncommunicative, leaving Leon to contend with a circle of friends and associates he can't trust. After shooting rather than getting shot by his duplicitous supervisor in a tense late-night encounter along the river, he can avoid suspicion only so long before the brutal secret police, Emniyet, are onto him and the secretly stashed Alexei. There is little about the novel that is not familiar, but this is comfort fiction of the smartest, most compelling and non-pandering kind. Even as he evokes classics such as Casablanca, The Quiet American and A Perfect Spy, Kanon shows off his gift for morally gripping themes, heart-stopping suspense and compelling characters. With dialogue that can go off like gunfire and a streak of nostalgia that feels timeless, this book takes its place among espionage novels as an instant classic.

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Starred review from April 1, 2012

Some thrillers don't just entertain but put us smack in the middle of tough moral questions, and it's no surprise that the author of The Good German has done just that in his superbly crafted new work. Leon Bauer is an American businessman living in Istanbul during World War II whose German Jewish wife helped smuggle Jews to Palestine until she lost her mind after a traumatic incident. During the war, Leon did the occasional odd job for the American embassy, but with the fighting just over he has one last assignment: to help smuggle into Istanbul someone the Americans want badly--and want badly to keep from the Soviets. The pickup goes horribly wrong, as Leon and friend Mihai are fired upon and Leon ends up killing their assailant. Later, Mihai angrily recognizes the man they've smuggled in as someone with a horrible past; Leon is even more shocked to discover the identity of the gunman he killed. And so it goes, as each expert twist and turn places Leon in an increasingly precarious situation and the reader wonders desperately, What would I have done? VERDICT A beautifully conceived and atmospheric thriller; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 11/28/11.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2012
WWII espionage didn't stop when the hostilities ended; coalitions were realigned, and players switched teams, but the cloaks and daggers weren't put awayespecially in Istanbul, a neutral city with one foot in Europe and one in Asia, where gossip is always a highly marketable currency. American businessman Leon Bauer was drawn into the shadow world during the warswapping information, helping Jews escape the Reichbut now it's 1945, and he thinks he's out of it, after one last assignment: shepherding a Romanian refugee, who may have ties to the Nazis, to safety. Inevitably, the job goes wrong, badly wrong, and Leon is left with the Romanian on his hands, and all variety of special agentsAmerican, Russian, Palestinianinterested in claiming a pound of flesh. As he did in The Good German (2001), set in Berlin in 1945, Kanon finds in the months immediately after the war's end a historical moment ripe with the intrigue of transition, and the exotic nature of Istanbul itselfa city seemingly always in transitiononly adds to that palpable sense of atmosphere driving action. What Alan Furst does for wartime espionage, Kanon does for its postwar cousin.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)