“What changed things forever, and most certainly for better, was the cunt.”
The pathetic epithet, malevolently and monstrously misogynist, is the catalyst for Aircraftman John Holderness to bypass basic training and be fast tracked into the secret service.
It’s just one of the many depth charge discoveries that explode though THEN WE TAKE BERLIN, John Lawton’s expansive historical spy saga that takes us from the London Blitz to the Berlin Wall.
Holderness, known as Wilderness to all the women in his life and Joe to all the blokes, was brought up by his burglar granddad to become the apotheosis of stealthy thievery. These skills in stealth and safe cracking coupled with his remarkably high IQ and aptitude for languages make him a prime candidate for recruitment for HMSS at the close of WWII.
His recruiter is Lieutenant Colonel Burne-Jones, Coldstream Guard and Cold War warrior whose mentoring duly takes on more than mere asset handling maturing into the paternal for the prodigiously talented protégé.
Their relationship is one of the chief delights of this thunderingly good thriller that gallops through a twenty year panorama of Nazi pestilence and East West paranoia.
In my minds eye I visualised a young Michael Caine as Wilderness and Nicholas Farrell as Burne-Jones.
As good as Greene, Le Carre and Fleming, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN winks and nods at those doyens of the cloak and dagger genre, takes the baton and charges home in its author’s own inimitable style.
The title isn’t so much a play on words of a Leonard Cohen song as a clever cypher of linking the Manhattan Project to a planned escape under the Berlin Wall by a nuclear physicist, on the very day that President Kennedy makes his auspicious speech in the divided city. One half expects a copy of From Russia With Love to fall out of Kennedy’s pocket as he makes last minute notes to what has become an infamous speech.
To get to this delirious denouement, Lawton teases a story of towering imagination and historical sweep with an incredible eye for detail and an acute ear for dialogue.
“If you were French or Dutch, the Nazis occupied your country. If you were German they occupied your mind”.
English, Russian, German, American idiom flow through this sensational tale like a river of Babel, and the characters of various countries and cultures are also vividly depicted.
Wilderness’s formative years as apprentice felonious feline filcher under the safe cracking safe hands of his grandfather reads like Charles Dickens out of Eric Ambler, and the black market racketeering is Lime /Greene to the point of cue the zither at the point of attribution.
Martinis made and weapons weighed without fetish – Walther wins, stirs trumps shaken – there’s action on the Orient Express and rendezvous and shadowings in Bratislava, the spooks paradise.
Literate, lush, lusty and laugh out loud audacious, THEN WE TAKE BERLIN is an origin story that squeals for sequel. How good is it? Better.