In 'White Death,' Troy takes on changing world
A Little White Death
By John Lawton
Atlantic Monthly, 448 pp., $23
It's 1963, and England is about to explode -- not literally, although John Lawton's protagonist Freddie Troy has survived his share of bombs, guns, and other nasty devices, but socially, as the generation defined by World War II begins to give way to what we would aptly call the baby boomers. The Profumo scandal has shaken the government, and nothing is sacred any longer. ''England will go boom," says one prescient character, a former spy whose life has been destroyed by the times. ''And when it does that's what will go, the common values wrought out of shared experience."
Of course, history has long been a playground for Lawton, whose three previous thrillers have followed Troy through the war and its aftermath and earned the British-American author comparisons to John Le Carré. Troy, a white Russian aristocrat, has worked his way up the Scotland Yard bureaucracy fighting off the evils of each age. In the last, possibly the best, ''Flesh Wounds," he faced the '50s-era gangland violence of the Kray-like Ryan brothers. In this outing, ''A Little White Death," the enemy is more nebulous. While Lawton borrows Profumo for a plot device -- a Soviet spy and a member of parliament share the same sex partners -- he's really pitting Troy against a changing world.
It's a difficult pitch, and the usually swift and subtle Lawton takes his time setting it up. The book opens in January 1963, when Troy is pulled out of England's worst winter in decades at the request of an old friend. Landing in Cairo, then moving onto Moscow, he begins to glimpse the end of an era. Aging journalists are being passed over, and old spies are sent back into the cold. ''I must be losing my touch," says one has-been. ''Wrong tense," responds Troy to himself.
The action really begins months later, with what seems like old-school decadence. Troy is dragged off to a weekend at an acquaintance's Sussex estate. ''You know, one of those pre-war long weekends. Turn up for tea on Saturday, set off home same time Monday." But the sexual hijinks -- which will turn into that echo of Profumo -- are new to Troy's experience. Two deaths, possible suicides, and the disappearance of a key witness should get him back on more familiar ground. However, his presence at that wild weekend has compromised him, and when a debilitating illness is diagnosed, Troy has to battle his own weakness and the best wishes of friends and colleagues to get back to the case.
Troy is not a superhero. By this point in the series, he's collected enough scars and emotional baggage for almost everyone to be pushing him toward retirement, and this outing may do it. Lawton understands him, however, and makes us understand why he fights that push. The sickly child who can't stand being bedridden as an adult; the aristocratic outsider who fits in neither at Scotland Yard nor among his British peers, Troy is complex and sympathetic. And Lawton gives him equally complicated associates in Anna, his married lover and conflicted doctor; Angus, her crazy husband, who is also a friend; and his older brother Rod, whose political career is ending. Watching these characters interact has always been one of the joys of Lawton's work. The world is turning for all, everyone reacts differently.
These relationships also make the best of plotting that pales in comparison to ''Flesh Wounds." Perhaps because the enemy is more diffuse and the situation more complex, ''A Little White Death" strays from the kind of straight-ahead thriller at which Lawton excels. But if Lawton has bit off more than he can chew in what may be Troy's final adventure, his work still stands head and shoulders above most other contemporary thrillers, earning those comparisons to Le Carré. Maybe it takes more than one enemy, or gang, to defeat Troy. If he is outmanned in ''A Little White Death," it took the turning of the world to do it.
