Rating: 
Summary: Walk the distance, it is worth it
Review: "The Company" has been out for a while, but I have only just come round to reading it. I found it hard to put down, once I read the first 50 pages or so. But then I had to because the book's length makes it difficult to read it in one go.
As with all historical novels you always wonder how close they are based on reality. Characters like Jim Angleton and the Sorcerer/Harvey Torriti (presumably Bill Harvey) should be straight out of reality. On the other hand, you wouldn't mind it to be pure fiction after you discover that one of rising stars in the CIA was discovered to be working for the other side - thirty years after he was hired.
Generally, the book doesn't follow history too closely, but what does one expect. It is a novel. Besides, if Robert Littell had included all the battlegrounds between the CIA and the KGB, this book would come in several volumes.
I don't have any favorite episodes. I loved the whole book. It is great that there are some good spy novels coming out of America.
Rating:
Summary: A MASTERPIECE FOR LOVERS OF SPY FICTION
Review: "The Company" is simply the best spy novel that I have ever read.
As an alumnus of the CIA and an unabashed lover of spy fiction
in all of its forms,I also tend to be a tough critic. However,
Littell has created a masterpiece.He skillfully blends real-life
and fictional characters and weaves a story based around real events -- the Soviet invasion of Hungary,the Bay of Pigs,the
Able Archer incident that could have led to World War III,and
the attempted coup against Gorbachev that finally put an end to the Soviet Union. This approach easily could have gone awry.Since
most of the actual events and real-life characters are well-known,the book could have either been boring or incredible.
Instead,it is a compelling story in which the reader cares about all of the characters and gets completely caught up in even the
familiar events of the past.Littell treats all of his characters
-- even the "villains" -- relatively sympathetically,which makes
the whole novel more interesting and compelling.Most important,he
demostrates that he is a masterful story teller.I was genuinely
sad to finish this book.I would have gladly read another 900 pages!
Rating:
Summary: The ultimate spy novel
Review: At first, I though 1200 pages (I have the UK paperback) was a bit long. Very long. But once I got into this book, I couldn't put it down. There are dozens of characters, and the plot follows the great events of the second half of the 20th century, with a drive that is rare in spy novels. Littell is a master at creating atmosphere, and his characters stick with you like chewing gum from a hot sidewalk.I read this in just a few days, in spite of its length, staying up far too late to do so. I'm looking forward to his next book.
Rating:
Summary: LITTELL IS HIDING BEHIND THE THIN FINGER OF "FICTION"
Review: Fiction my foot!!!This excellent "work of fiction" smells of a lot of reality!!What truly devasted me was James Jesus Angleton's
swansong when Starik(the Old Man)had succeeded in discrediting
him.Angleton identifies a couple of Western notables who are in the Soviet payroll,among them none other than Averell Harriman.THIS IS TRULY AN EARTH-SHAKING REVELATION!!!Many
would think that this is too far-fetched,but remember that Martin Bormann,Hitler's deputy,was a Soviet agent. Maybe Littell is trying to save his skin from the reputedly murderous COMPANY,but as for me I can see right through his work.
If there's any fiction in this book it would be the embellishment
associated with the agents' adventures in Hungary,Afghanistan,
USSR,etc,etc.This book would have been better off as an actual
history of the COMPANY,not a work of "fiction". I would have also loved an account of the Cuban Missile debacle
and what the behind-the-scenes action was like,but was truly disappointed when that did not materialise.Another startling revelation was the assassination of John Paul the First a.k.a
Albino Luciani.His death was always smelly.When I was a boy in
the early 1990s I read a book titled The Keys of this Blood,and I suspected the COMPANY of having assassinated him.It's highly unlikely that the election of John Paul the Second was free and fair.Remember he was the first non-Italian Pope in more than 400
years,and he worked very closely with the COMPANY in destabilising communist Eastern Europe;not to mention that "His Holiness" has openly boasted of having "shaken the rotten tree of Communism",leading to the demise of the Soviet Union.I was hoping that Littell would at least say something about this. THE COMPANY is a great read but for those who are well read in current world affairs,it was disappointingly inadequate!!!
Rating: 
Summary: The $64 trillion Question
Review: I enjoyed this book, and I suggest you read it if you like spy fiction or are curious about the CIA.
I agree that some reviewers below reveal too much of the plot, although the author himself tips the biggest "surprise" withing the first quarter of the book.
As a writer, the author is certainly not John Le Carre, and tends to be clumsy at points, but the story carries the day. The author does make some factual errors, especially anachronisms, but they only hurt for a moment, since the plot is usually engrossing enough to carry the reader past them. There are number of typos that sometimes are annoying, but that is the publishers' fault.
One major quibble. The author glosses over the biggest single fact and failure in the history of the CIA and American policy in the second half of the twentieth century: how could the CIA and the American government miss the fact that the Soviet Union was in a long collapse beginning in the late sixties, and almost ready to implode by 1980? Many many people, both public and private, who visited the Soviet Union recognized and reported that fact. Almost any Russian, speaking privately, was aware of that fact and willing to share it.
The answers are glossed over in the book -- first, intelligence services have to "serve" their political masters, and there were no successful American political figures willing to publicly state that the Soviets were collapsing, and many whose careers were partly built on the notion of the famous "bear in the woods." CIA agents and analysts reporting that the Soviet Union was about to implode would have been looking for other work. Second, after the moles and false intelligence of the fifties and other failures, the US gradually lost interest in human sources and began depending on electronic, spy plane, and satellite data gathering. Unfortunately, those techniques could not tell us that Soviet missiles were falling apart in silos half filled with water, that missile submarines spent so much time in port not because the Soviets didn't trust their officers but because the subs were broken down, that a very large part of the Soviet GDP was either fictional or so defective that it might as well have been, and that the Soviets' military spending peaked in the mid-sixties and declined in real terms despite the large added costs of the confrontation with China and the Afghan war. American taxpayers and American society paid the huge cost in dollars of this mistake, but the book makes no attempt to discuss it, even though it has been widely documented since the end of the Cold War.
That aside, I think the history and portrayal of historic figures is interesting and pretty accurate. The plot is fun and exciting, even when you know how it is going to come out, and the episodic structure allows readers to enjoy an exciting yarn and still get to sleep at a decent hour.
Rating:
Summary: Almost Brilliant
Review: I genuinely enjoyed reading this lengthy tome. It's quite a book, and the insertion of fictional characters and possible or probable events into real history helped give you the feeling that you were reading the real inside workings of the CIA. It also cleverly laid the blame for some CIA foibles at the feet of fictional characters, enabling the author to explore those events without risking the embarassment of any real people. Unfortunately, two of the most pivotal historical American events that took place during my lifetime were whizzed past in this novel: the Viet Nam war and the assassination of John Kennedy. I guess some things are still too hot to touch. I have one other minor complaint: the White House conversations involving former president Reagan rang false. I watched Reagan on television for eight years, and the figures and patterns of speech assigned to him in the novel didn't fit the reality I remember. He may really have been befuddled, as he is portrayed here, but he continued to speak publicly with confidence and authority even after the assassination attempt. I would have imagined him speaking just as well in an important meeting like the one imagined in the book. For fans of the spy novel, cold war era, I would highly recommend this book. In addition, conspiracy buffs and fans of James Ellroy's American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand will probably enjoy this.
Rating:
Summary: An Epic Story
Review: I owned two copies of this book and even tried listening to an audio version before finally sitting down with a third copy (given to me by a friend who highly recommended the book) and pushed my way through it. Once I got past the first 50 or so pages, where I usually gave up before, the book had me hooked. Robert Littell has written an epic story detailing the rise of America's clandestine services, their early successes, and their eventual mis-steps that would lead to the rise of terrorists like Osama bin Laden. This is a spy novel like no other I've read. At times I found myself riveted to the page, shocked at some of the plot points. This turned out to be a great book and I can only kick myself for not reading it sooner.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, Intriguing Work
Review: I truly enjoyed _The Company_, which was the first ~1,000 page novel that I absolutely could not put down. Littell did a brilliant job at combining an intriguing plot with historical fact. Admittedly, I was entertained by Clancy's _Rainbow Six_, yet, this work was far deeper and engaging. Unlike Clancy's style, personality and psychology overshadow fancy technological gadgetry, which is likely more indicative of how the most prestigious government agency operates. I am now a fan of the Littell spy novel. Keep them coming.
Rating:
Summary: Read this book.
Review: I wonder how many of the professional reviewers here and elsewhere actually read all of 'The Company'. I mean anyone can look at it, hold it, see the blurbs and say something safe like ' Littell has written the quintessential cold war novel', or 'Littell has redefined the spy novel genre'. Well, I read it and though I'm no critic I'm here to say it is a terrific book. It is literary without being highbrow. It is action packed without being comic bookish. The narration is incredibly descriptive but still manages somehow to be sparse and concise. Strong characters are established without resorting to any undue sentimentality. In short, it has everything you want, and nothing you don't. Sure, I found a couple of very minor flaws ( e.g. an answering machine is in an average person's apartment in 1974) and once or twice the dialogue is really there for the reader's benefit and not representative of the information people in their respective postions would need to convey in regular conversation (e.g, one senior CIA veteran tells another that then President George Bush was once head of The Company), but who cares? The bottom line for this reader was I enjoyed every one of the 900 gripping pages more than I have enjoyed any novel in a long time and show up in this forum to recommend it very highly.
Rating: 
Summary: A Fine Schematic With an Oliver Stone Look at Details
Review: There is no question that Robert Littell did a huge amount of research and writing to produce this fictional megaepic of the CIA. Given the level of sophistication of generations not born yet when most of the principal characters joined the Agency, Littell may well emerge as the Oliver Stone of CIA literature. Some reviewers are impressed that NAMES are used - Bill Casey, Adrian Philby, Jim Angleton, Howard Hunt, etc. I found those characters - excepting "Mother" as Angleton was known - far less impressively drawn than such as the traitorous Leo Kritzky, pedophile Starik, the CIA Berlin Station chief, "Sorcerer", and even the chronically ill Andropov. And the latter was based on fact.
For the reader not well versed in Cold War intelligence matters, the book is a sweeping overview fleshed out with Littell's imagined details. Many of those details are less than accurate or even credible - say the farewell dinner in Heidelberg for Albanian agents about to be parachuted into their homeland, escape off the Bay of Pigs-side beach by a CIA officer liasing with the Cuban exile brigade, and ability to withstand "Mother's" torture by the fouled toilet water-drinking Kritzky.
Some readers will be enthralled by the details. But others may finish the book and wonder why it took nearly 900 pages for the Soviets to launch their incredible defense to a U.S. move that Andropov imagines is about to occur. Given its ending, a reader may also wonder why the novel lasted longer than the Cold War.
|
