The Ills of Integrity

CHECKPOINT by Charles W. Thayer. 303 pp. Harper & Row. $4.95.

Like many another weanling career diplomat, Charles Thayer knew Berlin before the war. Afterward, as Foreign Service officer, unofficial State Department troubleshooter and finally, journalist, he often went back. Now he has written an international spy thriller. To no one's surprise, the book is about a man who served in prewar Berlin as a weanling career diplomat and then, as a journalist and State Department troubleshooter, gets called back to help out during a Berlin Wall crisis.

Checkpoint reeks of authenticity. Some of it is just that of a competent journalist rendering the sights and sounds of Berlin today--the nightmarish rumble of U.S. tanks massing at dawn along the border, the frustrated rage of West Berlin student rioters, the strange claustrophobia of the beleaguered city, which extends even to the press of boats cluttering the Wannsee of a Sunday afternoon. More rare is Diplomatic Insider Thayer's ability to convey with tape-recorder fidelity imaginary encounters between U.S. diplomats and the Russians in the kind of baleful restricted bargaining that still sometimes takes place in the city.

Thriller writing, however, is a deceptively demanding craft. Checkpoint's dialogue sometimes creaks drably under a weight of exposition, and an attempt to rekindle ashes of the hero's old romance seems dusty indeed.

Ironically, however, what really ails the book is an excess of integrity. To work at all, a contemporary thriller must convince the reader that, beneath a thin shell of authentic background, all hell can and will break loose any minute. But Thayer is so faithful in rendering the Berlin situation of the near past that it is impossible to believe that anything more than another standoff will result from the tense confrontation between U.S. and Russian forces that he creates as climax. It is all a little like reading a cliff-hanging account of the Battle of Jutland. Instructive--but unthrillingly predictable.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.