The Berlin Exchange, by Joseph Kanon
Twists and turns through the eyes of a spy of sorts.
The protagonist in The Berlin Exchange, Martin Keller, an American imprisoned in England for providing atomic secrets to the Russians, is exchanged in 1963 Berlin for prisoners held in East Germany. In true Joseph Kanon form, the fireworks start early with gunfire and a hijacked ambulance when “wall jumpers” attempt to speed across to the West at the Invalidenstrasse checkpoint. By then the small backstories have also begun. As the novel progresses they become the building blocks for Keller’s character, the secrets he’d provided to the Russians, why his wife was not arrested and then moved to East Germany, remarrying, and taking with her his son Peter, a precocious boy, the star of an East German propaganda television story. These vignettes are common elements in all of Kanon’s novels, adding one rich layer after another to the story to build suspense. Technically, Keller is a spy, but the reader doesn’t know for much of the novel whether he is a current spy or just a former spy, and an amateurish one at that, or just a physicist who believed that atomic secrets were best shared so that no one country had the monopoly, mutually assured destruction a good deterrence. The events that occur in the novel are secondary to the characters, another Kanon technique. The characters are the plot, and a good part of the action is depicted through dialogue.
Joseph Kanon’s novels all take place after the fall of Nazi Germany, although each contains backstories from the war years. The earlier books, such as Los Alamos and Alibi, deal with the immediate aftermath of the war. The novels then move into what one could say was the pre-Cold War era, like The Prodigal Spy and Stardust, in which the communist menace is front and center. Next come the Berlin novels, The Good German and Leaving Berlin, which moves ahead in time to 1948. Defectors takes place in 1961, well into the Cold War, and includes the intrigues of operations involving the CIA and the KGB. Next is Kanon’s penultimate book, The Accomplice, which takes place a couple of years later in Buenos Aires, but deals with the medical atrocities carried out by the Nazi’s. Now comes The Berlin Exchange, which takes place in 1963 East Berlin, almost fifteen years after the events in Leaving Berlin. Much has changed. Some of the bomb damage from the war has been repaired and new construction is evident, “a shapeless open plaza surrounded by Glass high-rises, a cheap version of West Berlin.” The Hotel Adlon and the Alexanderplatz, with a new radio tower, have been restored. Even the Stasi has been upgraded, it seems. A new Communist world.
The Berlin Exchange is the most literary of Kanon’s spy novels, so much so that one hesitates to even use the “spy” moniker for fear that it will be mistaken for a modern day commercial spy entertainment, one with full throttle plot and shallow characters. Kanon in an interview with Paul Vidich (also a literary spy novelist) in 2019 said that for him spies make ideal protagonists because “They lie for a living.” That is, of course, true for many people. And Martin is in so many respects just like many of us: idealistic, tormented by his past, and capable of betrayal and deception. The reader learns about him as the layers of his psyche are peeled away, his memories of his ex-wife, Sabine, are made known, her deceptions are revealed, and his feelings for his son, Peter, grow. Kanon’s prose is direct, the descriptions sparse and limited to times of action, like the scuffle with Herr Spitzer at the restaurant dumpster, the car chase between Berlin and Potsdam, or the final confrontation at a border crossing. The characters and the plot are rendered in magnificent dialogue, giving the reader the opportunity to make his or her own impression of Martin, through his interactions with Andrei, Martin’s old handler, with Kurt, Sabine’s second husband, Stefan Schell, a scientist with whom Martin sympathizes, and Klaus Fuchs, an old partner in atomic espionage. There are few adverbs that paint pictures of the characters. Personalities and appearances are revealed by the words they speak.
Perhaps it is only a coincidence that the novel’s protagonist, Martin, shares a name with the protagonist of Graham Greene’s novel, The Third Man. But the similarities between the two novels and the two writers are hard to ignore, both featuring deception and betrayal set in the post-World War II world. With each of Kanon’s books, his writing has evolved toward the simplicity for which Greene is known, as well as the use of character development to create plot. In Greene’s The Quiet American, Fowler, while hiding from the Vietminh observes, “I thought of nothing, not even of the trap-door above me. I ceased, for those seconds, to exist: I was fear taken neat.” The action here is secondary to the character. And Martin in The Berlin Exchange, next to Sabine on the ground at Invalidenstrasse, “felt her slip away again . . a film loop running backward, so that he was watching her lying here in the road, then in the hospital the night Peter was born, smiling, then on the bed in the prefab house in Los Alamos . . . then on the couch at Georg’s party, feet curled up beneath her, smoking and looking at him. And then the loop ran out and she was gone.” The guns firing just moments before were but a tangent to Martin’s character. Who he is, and what has happened to him, are brilliantly encapsulated in this brief moment with unadorned prose, much the same as that used by Greene for Fowler.
Kanon’s prose is clean, uncluttered by adverbs, and his dialogue is razor sharp. He is one of only a few authors of literary spy novels to have accomplished this. His novels are a long way from commercial espionage thrillers like those of Clancy, which are choked by diatribe and political rhetoric. Kanon doesn’t preach. The reader is offered a view of the political state of East Berlin only through the crisp exchanges between Martin and Kurt or Martin and Andrei. At one point Kurt explains how things work in his world: “Sometimes it’s better to make a friend. You need a favor one day, it’s there for you. Do a good job, they don’t forget.” And still these dialogues are secondary to Kanon’s real focus on the dynamic between Martin and Kurt concerning their relationships with Sabine, which in turn illustrates the complexity of a spy’s life. Kurt says, “Maybe she misses the old excitement, with the Service. I was worried when you were coming, that you’d remind her. Of happier times.” As the novel moves forward, characters are added to the mix: Klaus Fuchs, Stefan Schell, Ruth Jacobs, Hans Reiger, Ed Nugent and the other Americans at the US Military Liaison Mission in Potsdam. And along with them come the scenes that move the plot forward: Sabine’s illness, Andrei’s recruitment of Martin to inform on Schell, Kurt’s lucrative exchange business that moves people to the West, and finally, of course, Martin’s exchange plan, which is probably the one referenced in the books title. It is “the last exchange . . . over the invisible border.”
With The Berlin Exchange Joseph Kanon travels a long way from Leaving Berlin. During the journey he streamlines his prose, sharpens his dialogue, and creates a simple elegance for his story. The action in the novel is paced well. It rockets to its conclusion, but it does so smoothly. The finale is not as convoluted as that in Leaving Berlin, and much more credible. Martin stays true to his character of the amateur spy. He doesn’t anticipate Andrei’s arrival, and is genuinely taken unaware by Sabine’s conduct. The ending is simple, yet powerful, particularly with the image of the small head of Martin’s son sitting in the car, waiting. A reader of a literary spy novel should never expect a happy ending, a triumph of good over evil. The lies are only exchanged for different lies, deceit being passed back and forth from West to East. Kurt asks Martin if he got what he came for. And the answer, unsurprisingly, is “not everything.”
For more about Joseph Kanon, visit his website at http://josephkanon.com/about-the-author/