The Prodigal Spy

Rating:
Summary: Highly entertaining
Review: an historical novel of the not so distant past. the red scare with hoover setting up his own police state in an ironic emulation of the ostensible enemy. a family is torn apart by the then prevailing zeitgeist. prague behind the iron curtain is skillfully brought to light.

Rating:
Summary: Predictable outcome with lost potential
Review: I feel a need to warn those readers who don't read past the first few reviews to take your time before ordering this book. While Kanon's first book, Los Alamos, may not have won prizes for literary writing, it was intelligent, creative and instructive. The Prodigal Spy had so much potential. The story could have happened, the characters could have been real. But the final result: hackneyed dialogue, unbelievable characters, and an ending I guessed after the first chapter. The best parts: the lasting pain of the McCarthy hearings, a reminder of FBI abuses, and the excellent descriptions of eastern Europe. Keep trying, Mr. Kanon. I'm still intrigued enough with your innate talents and insights to try the next one.

Rating:
Summary: great spy yarn
Review: I fell in love with Kanon's dialogue in Los Alamos but found myself ignoring the love story and wanting more mystery. The Prodigal Spy was much more to my liking in this respect. The dialogue is great, not cheesy and mundane like most books these days. The story between father and son is gripping. Normally I'm not interested in this type of story, family redemption and so on, but this book somehow made it not only work, but made it interesting. The cold war setting is well layed out, and his descriptions of Prague and its Big Brother way of life are eerily well written. It's this middle section of the book, when the protagonist visits his father in Prague and is accused of murder, when he must deal with lack of freedom in a communist state and find a way out of his mess, that really proves Kanon's ability to tell a great story. The ending seemed too quick paced, and sadly it was pretty easy to figure out who the killer was(the last five pages do contain a nice twist though). All in all I highly recomend this to anyone who likes a great history oriented story, and of course, a good old fashion spy yarn.

Rating:
Summary: An Intriguing Look at the Abuses of Power
Review: If you are like me, you thought you knew what you thought about the Red hunts in Washington in the early 1950s and about Soviet spying activities since then. Joseph Kanon changed my perspective completely by focusing on Nick Kotlar, the son of a man accused of being a Soviet agent by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As the book begins, Nick is ten and his house is surrounded by reporters every morning before his father heads to the Capitol to testify. As the story continues, Nick plays a determined hand in trying to understand what was going on . . . and what it all meant. The book becomes an amazing story of finding oneself by sifting through the ruined lives of the older generation.

The book is in three sections (in Washington D.C. in 1950, in Europe 18 years later, and back in the United States shortly thereafter). The first two are riveting and tremendously rewarding. The final section is far too predictable to work well. I recommend that you read the book, nevertheless. You can actually skip the final section if you want. I think I would have liked the book better if I had.

I listened to this book rather than read it. The version I listened to was the unabridged one by Books on Tape. Michael Kramer does an impressive job with the different characters by altering his voice more than I thought possible. Some of the voices he does for the people in Czechoslovakia are brilliant! Try to listen to this version if you can.

After you finish reading or listening to the book, think about where today power is being used to create harm and deny freedom of choice. Where is it being done by totalitarian regimes . . . and where by democratic ones? What are the differences? How can such abuses of power be eliminated?

Rating:
Summary: An Intriguing Look at Abuses of Power
Review: If you are like me, you thought you knew what you thought about the Red hunts in Washington in the early 1950s and about Soviet spying activities since then. Joseph Kanon changed my perspective completely by focusing on Nick Kotlar, the son of a man accused of being a Soviet agent by the House Un-American Activities Committee. As the book begins, Nick is ten and his house is surrounded by reporters every morning before his father heads to the Capitol to testify. As the story continues, Nick plays a determined hand in trying to understand what was going on . . . and what it all meant. The book becomes an amazing story of finding oneself by sifting through the ruined lives of the older generation.

The book is in three sections (in Washington D.C. in 1950, in Europe 18 years later, and back in the United States shortly thereafter). The first two are riveting and tremendously rewarding. The final section is far too predictable to work well. I recommend that you read the book, nevertheless. You can actually skip the final section if you want. I think I would have liked the book better if I had.

I listened to this book rather than read it. The version I listened to was the unabridged one by Books on Tape. Michael Kramer does an impressive job with the different characters by altering his voice more than I thought possible. Some of the voices he does for the people in Czechoslovakia are brilliant! Try to listen to this version if you can.

After you finish reading or listening to the book, think about where today power is being used to create harm and deny freedom of choice. Where is it being done by totalitarian regimes . . . and where by democratic ones? What are the differences? How can such abuses of power be eliminated?

Rating:
Summary: A Story of Deceit, Lies and a Prodigal Bond
Review: It is 1950 and the House Un-American Activities Committee accuses ten-year-old Nick's father, Walter Kotlar, an undersecretary at the Department of State, of being a Communist spy. Nick finds out by seeing him being interrogated by congressmen on the newsreel while at the movies. He refuses to believe it, but his father leaves little doubt when he flees the country in the shadow of the suspicious death of a young woman who testified against him.

Jump ahead to the late '60s, and after serving time with the U.S. Army in Vietnam, Nick is in Europe with his stepfather, Larry, who is in Europe to represent the U.S. at the Paris peace talks to end the war in Vietnam. Nick has put his real father, who has since turned up in the Soviet Union where he admitted to being a spy and had received the Order of Lenin, behind him.

While in Paris Nick meets Molly, an American hippie type, who tell him his father is now living in Czechoslovakia and wants to see him. In Prague Nick's father tells him that he had been betrayed and framed for murder. He also tells him he wants to come home and that he'll give up the names of spies still operating in exchange for life in America.

Nick and Molly go to Washington to search out the spies fingered by Nick's father, including one highly placed agent named Silver, who has been selling out his country for decades and who Nick believes is responsible for many deaths. And now this spy named Silver may even be after Nick.

Mr. Kanon has written a super mystery-thriller that tells the sordid story of McCarthyism as you burn the midnight oil, eagerly reading through the pages to see what comes next in this tale of intrigue that has an ending I guarantee you won't see coming.

Rating:
Summary: Good, But Not Great, Follow-up to "Los Alamos"
Review: Joseph Kanon's first book was the well crafted "Los Alamos," which took place during 1945. This novel starts a few years later, during the height of the McCarthy red scare in the 1950s and then mvoes forward some twenty years to its conclusion.

Nick Kotlar, all of ten years old, is caught up in the McCarthy hearings when his father is suspected of being a spy. When a key witness dies, his father flees the country and settles behind in the Soviet Union. Nick is devastated by his father's actions and his mother later marries a close ffriend of the family. In many ways, the opening chapters are the most compelling as we watch a child deal with the confusion surrounding his father's defection.

Years later, the adult Nick is contacted by his father to help him come home by finding the important, and still active spy, who actually was behind his father's fleeing, a move apparently orchestrated to protect the spy from detection. This sets up what starts as an intriguing mystery, but unfortunately it becomes fairly obvious who is behind the entire plot along the way. Nonetheless, there are a few surprising twists, especially near the end, although the book is not quite as satisfying as "Los Alamos."

Still, this is a fine story and Kanon has a good ear for dialogue that is credible and realistic. Enjoy it for what it is, a rather satisfying mystery set in the Cold War era.

Rating:
Summary: Predictable Resolution Wastes Great Potential
Review: The Prodigal Spy begins well with the McCarthyesque trial of Walter Kotlar experienced through the eyes of his son, Nick. Nick's certainty in his father's innnocence he discovers his father has one shirt the size the star witness claims to have sold him and rushes to get rid of the "evidence." Thinking he has fixed the problem, he is devastated when Walter flees after the suicide (murder?) of the key witness against him to turn up much later as a defector in the Soviet Union. Nick may be a bit precocious, but his actions seem plausibly childlike and realistic in his naive belief that getting rid of the shirt got rid of the problem. There is tremendous emotional power in this section of the book and it draws the reader in with its promise.

Years pass and and the adult Nick is asked by his father to help him come home by finding the important, and still active spy, who orchestrated Walter's defection in order to protect himself from discovery. This sets up what should be a satisfying and intriguing mystery, except the clues are too obvious and Nick to obtuse to see them.

The older Nick isn't as clever as the young Nick or surely he would have solved the mystery of who was the important spy as soon as he discovered his father's lighter was found at the scene of the suicide - now surely a murder. His equally obtuse inability to understand the witness's letter and discover who was the prime mover in this family tragedy was just as frustrating to this reader who wanted to shake him and tell him to just stop and think for one minute.

Over all, this is a fine story. It's well-written. The dialogue is credible and it's emotionally satisfying. However, as a mystery it lacks subtlety.

Rating:
Summary: Definitely a Home Run
Review: When I read Walter Kanon's first novel, "Los Alamos," I felt that we had a new thriller writer with real potential on our hands. That book didn't quite work, with the author spending too much time on atmosphere and the characters and not enough time on the plot. After all, in my book you read a thriller for the plot - if you want great characters and atmosphere, read Flaubert or Bellow. With "The Prodigal Spy," however, Mr. Kanon has definitely hit a home run. The characters are truly vivid, and the atmosphere of 1969 Prague is very well done indeed. But it is the plot that will stay in my mind, enthralling in its detail, complexity and surprises; all elements of the story are expertly balanced, making for a very enjoyable experience. This tale of a young man travelling behind the Iron Curtain to meet his long-lost defector father and then returning to the United States to uncover an even more important mole is worthy of comparison with le Carre, Greene and even Eric Ambler himself. I thought the denoument rather predictable, but that didn't spoil "a cracking good read." Bravo!

Rating:
Summary: Definitely a Home Run
Review: When I read Walter Kanon's first novel, "Los Alamos," I felt that we had a new thriller writer with real potential on our hands. That book didn't quite work, with the author spending too much time on atmosphere and the characters and not enough time on the plot. After all, in my book you read a thriller for the plot - if you want great characters and atmosphere, read Flaubert or Bellow. With "The Prodigal Spy," however, Mr. Kanon has definitely hit a home run. The characters are truly vivid, and the atmosphere of 1969 Prague is very well done indeed. But it is the plot that will stay in my mind, enthralling in its detail, complexity and surprises; all elements of the story are expertly balanced, making for a very enjoyable experience. This tale of a young man travelling behind the Iron Curtain to meet his long-lost defector father and then returning to the United States to uncover an even more important mole is worthy of comparison with le Carre, Greene and even Eric Ambler himself. I thought the denoument rather predictable, but that didn't spoil "a cracking good read." Bravo!