American Spy

Mer underholdende enn god. Tidshistorisk interessant med Thomas Sankara og Burkina Faso som småfrekt tema. Som thriller uforløst og lite intens, som fortelling fascinerende og samtidig veldig konstruert. Som mange amerikanske bestselgere litt skrivekursaktig i konstruksjonen. Anbefalt av Obamas bokklubb, akkurat det er mest en kuriositet.

American Spy is written as a letter to the narrator's (Marie) twin sons as she prepares to go after the CIA officer who ordered a hit on her. Marie is a black woman who grew up in Queens in the 1970's and worked for the FBI in the ‘80's. The main action of the book takes place in the mid-‘80's, Cold War times, when Marie is recruited to “get close to” Thomas Sankara, then president of Burkina Faso, and get information from him. There are several layers of deception to this recruitment which peel away as the story progresses and plans go off the rails.

As plans go off the rails, you start to wonder if it's happening because the people in the story are actually really bad spies, or if Lauren Wilkinson doesn't know enough about the work of spying to write a believable spy novel. Also, the character Marie has a great deal of confidence in her abilities, which is not always justified in her actions. If it's part of the story that she's actually not a very good spy even though she thinks she is, that's one thing. If it's just a poorly imagined spy story, that's another.

What this novel does well is show the parallels between the life of a spy and the life of a black woman in a white world. Marie is always assessing peoples' truthfulness, intentions toward her, their motivations, and she instinctively understands the need to guard her real identity, her own truthfulness, level of intelligence, and motivations. These things come easily to her, it seems, because she has done them all her life. Her father, a Vietnam veteran, became a policeman after the war, much to their community's puzzlement, and Marie's motivation for joining the FBI is also questioned. The complexity of Marie and her father's (and sister Helene's) loyalty to a country and authority structure that does not seem loyal to them is another major theme in this book, and is more compelling than the not-totally-convincing spy novel that is the vehicle.

Overall, I really enjoyed reading this novel.

2.5 stars. I'm not sure if this was a problem with my own expectations, or that the book was mis-marketed.

The cover blurb on my paperback describes this as an “espionage thriller” - and when I think “thriller,” I think of fast pacing, twists and turns. It starts out strong, the way I expected a thriller to be, but the pacing dipped back down and kind of barely hovered above the ground for most of the book. And that's the problem for me: if this had been marketed as a character study of Marie's journey into becoming a spy, or even a family “saga” (I say that with a tinge of irony, because the book is less than 300 pages) since so much has to do with Marie's mother and sister - whom we are led to believe are also both Feds - and Marie's children, I might have appreciated it more. But instead, I kept waiting for something major to happen. Even the climax felt anti-climactic.

It's complicated too. There's a lot that's unsaid, both in Marie's conversations and in what is presented to the reader. I believed Marie when she said she was good at her job, that external facts (racism, sexism) kept her in the field office instead of out being a spy, until I read Gabriella's review while I was finishing up. Her review makes some really good points about Marie's competence, and made me question what I thought of Marie. And I suppose that's great, that Marie is allowed to be a complicated mess, but I didn't buy a lot of the work she was doing, particularly in the second half off the book.

It'll make a good conversation for book club tonight. :)