Body of Lies

Book review by Jules Brenner

Villainy, and its source, changes with the times. The events of 9/11 changed who we perceive as our primary enemies, it changed the focus of our clandestine services and the laws that sanction them, and it changed the avatars of evil being drafted into the fictional context. The use of hooded, secretive men spouting hatred in the name of religion, or a madly contrived quest for domination and martydom is the new paradigm of antagonists for authors to set their heroes against. The list of mystery writers who have replaced their homegrown criminals, masterminds and mass murderers with the kafiyah-wearing plotters from the Middle East are too numerous to name. But few have done it better than David Ignatius.

As a columnist for the Washington Post, he has covered the CIA and the political muddle of the Middle East for twenty-five years and he couldn't have more intimate knowledge of the dynamics of operating there in the name of peace, politics and justice if he was an agent himself. One gets the impression from this book that his rendering of these people and their machinations come from first hand observation and inside experience. For my money, his "Body of Lies" outdoes the supposed master of the spycraft genre himself, John Le Carre'.

Which comes, I think, from a news writer's greatly attuned sense of clarity and a literary craftsman's mastery of suspense.

His central figure, CIA agent Roger Ferris, immediately defines himself as a hero worthy of our interest because of idealism of a sort we can relate to. No superhuman tough guy ala' Lee Child's muscular Jack Reacher or Robert Crais' Joe Pike, Ferris operates in what appears to be the more actual world of international intrigue with nothing more than skill, daring and political ingenuity. Martial arts have nothing to do with it. Despite a limp from a shrapnel wound by RPG in Iraq, his travels tell of great familiarity with international borders and what's within them.

As for his boss, the relatively unrestrained Ed Hoffman, chief of the CIA's Near East operations, who regards Roger as special in the fact that he speaks Arabic and can claim a muslim inheritance from a generation or two ago, making him highly useful in his contacts with players of major and minor importance.

Among the former, the most essential is their elegantly dressed, smoothly mannered adversary and friend (when it suits his purposes), Jordanian chief of intelligence Hani Salaam, himself a highly intelligent and perceptive man. Based in Amman, he more than once demonstrates command of the radical mindset and how to use it to extract information before you can call it a technique for torture.

The common enemy is a deeply hidden Al Qaida leader know as "Suleiman," who is behind a pattern of bombing operations in European cities and starting with a car bomb in Milan. A man whose voice is never captured by satellite detection, his location is virtually inpenetrable by any outsider, and his identification and capture just a dream. But, in this, Ferris demonstrates the mental agility that makes him a valuable agent. Applying a ploy used by the British in World War II to create enough doubt and pandemonium among the Nazis that they tore the fabric of their unity apart, Ferris comes up with a plan to employ the same strategy into the tight reaches of terrorist fanaticism. Hoffman is overjoyed with the prospect of constructing a web of deception designed to cause Suleiman's cell to destroy itself from within.

One of the first steps in the operation is to find a fresh corpse of the right size and type to be found by the terrorists and falsely identifiable as an agent with knowledge of things that suggest betrayals.

While the scheme is being built, Ferris is realizing that his marriage to Gretchen, a beautiful Department of Justice lawyer whom he thinks of as a self-made aristocrat, despite the physical rewards she lavishes on him with her extraordinary sexual appetite, lacks any true emotion. Idealistic to a fault, it's not enough for Ferris, and his discontent is made more acute when his passion grows for the mysterious and fascinating Alice Melville, a golden haired activist working with Palestinian refugees, an Arabic speaker as well, and beholden to no one. Her love for Ferris, in turn, is threatened by his professional dependance on lies, and he vows to correct that, for her, even if it means retirement.

His second vow is to protect her for all he's worth. But forces prove too great for him to control and he finds himself in an untenable situation that will likely mean his life.

What that amounts to is a last act suspense gut-grabber of the year and virtually ensures this novel's residence on best seller lists for weeks to come, very likely to inspire a major movie deal. There isn't a leading man out there who wouldn't want to play Roger Ferris in as three-dimensional a story of high stakes with a fine sense of proportion as you'll find. It's the stuff of major originality that you'll be glad to read early on.