Our Parents' Business

By Paul Gray

FAMILY TRADE by James Carroll; Little, Brown; 417 pages; $14.95

No one has founded a Thriller-of-the-Week Club, but the raw material is certainly available. Rare is the seven-day stretch that does not yield up yet another fictional secret agent trying to foil yet another diabolical plot against civilization. The continuing popularity of espionage books should be no mystery. They offer vicarious thrills to the deskbound, the fantasy that a lone hero can triumph over institutionalized evil. Such tales also feed a widespread, heartfelt suspicion: the world cannot be this messy and dangerous by accident. Someone is plotting all this on purpose. The feeling is not new. Faced with a similarly uncertain existence, the ancient Greeks imagined themselves controlled by peevish and capricious gods. Thrillers have simply repopulated the pantheon with bureaucrats, apparatchiks and hired gunsels.

Family Trade closely follows the iron-curtained rule of its genre. Those who like their espionage fast paced and complicated will not be disappointed. Big issues are at stake here; the struggle between East and West may hang in the balance. Winston Churchill and Allen Dulles appear in walk-on roles. An ordinary man is suddenly entangled in a web of deceptions, risking his life for reasons he does not understand. But Author James Carroll, 39, makes these familiar conventions seem fresh and even plausible. His characters are not puppets of the plot. They grow and change. They struggle with divided loyalties, knowing that their secret activities on behalf of some grand design force them to lie to their loved ones, betray them if necessary.

In 1960 a Georgetown University freshman named Jake McKay spots his father, "one of the most powerful men on the quiet side of Washington," at an art museum. But who is that beautiful blond woman on his arm, and who is that equally attractive girl with her? Jake hears his father exchange endearments with them in German, a language he did not think the elder McKay knew. Stunned by what he assumes is a scene of infidelity, Jake confides in his Uncle Giles, his mother's brother and a cultural attache with the British embassy. In a matter of days, Giles defects to Moscow. Jake's father, after a period of debriefing by his CIA superiors, suffers a stroke. Jake, already physically crippled since infancy by the explosion of a V-2 rocket that hit his parents' house in London, now comes down with a debilitating case of moral paralysis. His family is in tatters, and the two men he loved most are beyond his question: "How can I be on the team when nobody tells me what we're playing?"

A flashback to 1945 begins to unravel the tangles. John McKay Sr. and Giles Patterson lead a joint U.S.-British commando raid into the heart of Berlin. Their ostensible purpose is to destroy the air plane that is ready to lift Hitler from the burning city. Their real job is to keep German nuclear research out of the hands of the invading Soviets. Since the resistance group that they must work with is made up largely of Communists, this part of the mission proves tricky. The resistance leader helps them; they, in turn, evacuate his wife and baby daughter to the West.

Having jumped backward, the author suddenly leaps ahead. It is now 1980, and Jake is an English professor in Boston, still maimed by the events of two decades earlier: "McKay had once regarded it as the central task of his life to understand what had destroyed his family. Yet he had not directly addressed that question in twenty years." On cue, Magda Dettke, the infant from Berlin, appears in his office. Her mother, the woman Jake had seen in the museum 20 years ago, is dead. Magda now works for British intelligence, and she has startling news. Giles wants to redefect, but he will do so only if his nephew helps him cross from East to West Berlin. Jake realizes that his visitor and he are still children, possessed by the "ghosts of his father and her mother." Somehow they are both fated to complete "our parents' business."

Of course Jake goes with Magda to Berlin and finds himself in far greater peril than he had imagined. But his rite of passage is not only the literal trek from East back to West but the psychological journey toward true maturity. Experiencing the sense of danger that his father must have felt so often during his exploits, Jake comes face to face with the enemy: "I have blamed the world, my father, mother, uncle, and wife for all my weaknesses. I have wallowed in self-pity." It is time, he decides, to enter the free world.

Such moments adroitly balance the exotic and the familiar; an adventure that will shake Moscow and Washington also leads to a personal discovery, and both results seem equally important. In his fourth novel, Carroll again reveals the commercial instincts that made his Mortal Friends (1978) a best seller. In addition, this book reveals a serious novelist behind the popular entertainer. Like Graham Greene and John le Carre, Carroll brings global strife and problems home to hearts and minds, their points of origin. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

"The Wall is not just a wall. It is a stretch of noman's land thirty, forty, and in many places more than a hundred yards wide . ..

Jake and Magda were standing, faces into the wind, on a high wooden platform overlooking that gash. It was nearly dark now. The platform, sturdy and unornamented, was almost two stories high and built like a gallows at the spot just beyond the Tiergarten where Bellevuestrasse achieved its dead end in the Wall. From where they stood, they could see the center of East Berlin. Lights were on in all the buildings, but it was the brilliantly illuminated armed wasteland immediately in front that held their attention.

'I'd have been disappointed,' Jake said after --a long silence, 'if it wasn't hideous."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.