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PARTISAN REVIEW
EPITAPH FOR A SPYMASTER
HERE LIES: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. By Eric Ambler. Farrar, Straus
&
Giroux. $16.95.
Readers of spy fiction fall, it sometimes seems, into two
broad categories: those who really like the stuff and those who keep
wanting it to transcend itself. The latter pledge their allegiance to
John Le Carre, never mind the prolixity and ponderousness of his
later manner. The former swear by Eric Ambler.
It
was Ambler who paved the way for Le Carre's morally am–
biguous tales of introspective bureaucrats and inevitable betrayals;
the George Smiley novels could not have been written had Ambler
not staked out the territory first. But even as he revolutionized the
thriller, transforming it from a species of romantic fluff into a
politically-savvy vehicle for sustained suspense, Ambler never
sacrificed its built-in attractions. He traded in real fear and palpable
danger rather than in the make-believe thrills of an amusement-park
ride , and the effect was to enhance rather than diminish the genre's
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entertainment value.
One hallmark of Ambler's novels , from
Background to Danger
(1937) up to
The Care of Time
(1981), is a cool, understated prose
style that efficiently serves the exposition of his plausibly com–
plicated plots . Even hi s lesser efforts proceed at the right pace and
end exactly where they should . By contrast, an unkind critic might
say that inside many an overweight Le Carre novel there's a lean ,
clean thriller struggling vainly to be free .
The punning title of Ambler's admirable though tight-lipped
memoir makes its point about the author's wry reserve :
Here Lies Eric
Ambler,
as though what followed were the ironic epitaph of a spy
writer convinced that "only an idiot believes that he can write the
truth about himself." The book begins like a pastiche of an Ambler
thriller done with poker face for maximum impact. Having run his
car into a ditch between Geneva and Lausanne, the author , then
seventy-two, escaped injury except for a mild case of "amnesic
aphasia" - precisely the predicament that befalls Theodore Carter in
Ambler's
The Intercom Conspiracy.
Of what was the hero thinking in
those last moments of consciousness on the autoroute? And why
does the hospital doctor question him so closely?
