Dr. Strangelove
Banned
This novel's title, that AFAIK is still untranslated to english, could be translated as "Maybe the wind will take us to the infinite", which is its closing sentence. Yes, this is a "serious" novel written by a "serious" novelist. With robots. And lasers. And spies.
There are some background details that would qualify this novel as AH:
-France still being in NATO in 1980, and NATO headquarters still being in Paris.
-Sweden and Austria being members of NATO.
-A mention of Operation Barbarossa having taken place in 1940.
-A passing character being referred to as "a member in the Lower Saxon army".
-James Bond exists, but he's american. And a robot.
-Sexual predator female robot spies.
Except for the last one, these details are only background inconsistencies that have no influence in the novel, and could be interpreted as Torrente either Not Doing His Research, or not caring at all about that. Instead of being a novel about an alternate world, this novel feels as if it came from an alternate world in which "serious" novelists (Torrente was a candidate for the Nobel prize for many years) take the conventions of "non-serious" literature and play them straight to write serious meditations on the nature of life and identity. The end result is so unique and bizarre that I couldn't help but sharing it with you.
So let's say you're a 70-year old writer with immense critical prestige. One of your novels, La saga/fuga de J.B. -a 700-page behemoth about a galician city whose existence is kept secret by a large government conspiracy- has been hailed as Spain's response to Joyce and Pynchon. What else can you do? Well, you write a spy-thriller starring a shapeshifting spy. With lasers, shady conspiracies, and sexual predator female robot spies who track their victims via body odor.
The background of the novel can be summarized as follows: since the early 70's, the intelligence services of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact have been baffled by the actions of an unknown agent, codenamed The master whose tracks fade in the mist. Really. Nothing is known about him. He is supposed to have acted in ten operations -among them helping a cypriot general to defect to the East; kidnapping three laotian princes to change the power balance in Asia- using methods that seem to defy natural laws. His allegiance appears unclear, helping sometimes the East or the West for unknown reasons. Since nobody can claim to have actually seen him, the most extended opinion in NATO is that he does not actually exist, and that he is only an invention of the intelligence services to cover up some embarrassing failures.
But the reader knows from the beginning that The Master actually exists, and that he has incredible powers, because a) he's the narrator and b)he informs us in the very first paragraph of his supernatural abilities: he is able to adopt at will the shape and personality of any person he makes eye contact with, turning the original's body into a hollow shell easy to hide. No explanation is given as to why he has this incredible power. He has changed personalities so often all over the world, that he lost his original shape long ago and is currently living in the body of CIA agent Max Maxwell, whose original body is hidden at a barn in Sardinia. He does not remember his family or early childhood, and his earliest remembrances are about his childhood in India as a guru's disciple, who taught him to use his power. Sometime in the 50's, living in the body of a british writer, he was recruited by the MI5, and since then he has been a spy, working for no one except himself.
This is the truly brilliant twist in this novel: given a character with such an amazing power -he can even turn into inanimated objects, and even atmospherical phenomena-, a standard spy thriller would turn him into a power-hungry wanker wishing to rule the world by himself, or into a superhero going all emo about his Great Responsability. The Master is not such a thing: he is a really likeable and human fellow, who loves art and poetry and does not feel his power as a burden or an excuse to see himself as a superhuman, but only as a tool to do his job, and that the reader actually appreciates. His fall in love with Irina Tchernova; a russian dissident poet exiled in Paris who is actually a KGB agent, and his abandonment of the spy world due to his last mission, is the core of the novel.
He does not care about ideology, or about either side's victory: for him, the spy world, with all its paranoia and hidden identities is the only place where he can feel happy and at home. With his power, he can manipulate both sides, not for his own gain, but to keep the equilibrium and prevent them from either starting WWIII and nuking the whole world, or becoming too weak and ending the cold war, and thus this world of spies he finds so comfortable. During the novel he undertakes two missions with the intent of sabotaging NATO's superiority: first, under the disguise of both a french navy captain and later a soviet agent, he steals NATO's newest strategic plan and sells it to the soviets. It is inside the body of agent Etvuchenko that he meets Irina, whom he immediately falls in love with. Later, with Irina's help, he will help Professor Fletcher's wife defect to East Berlin to meet him: Fletcher is a deeply christian scientist who has developed a laser that could be fired from orbit. Fearing that his invention would be used by NATO to annihilate the east, he has defected to the other side leaving his wife and projects behind. But these missions are only a Xanatos Gambit for The Master to hunt his deadliest enemy: Eve Gradner.
Miss Gradner is the most advanced offspring of the Andromaca Project, a CIA project to build a perfect robotic agent, to eliminate the human factor from intelligence operations (the book was written in 1983, one wonders if Torrente would have watched Blade Runner). The Master fears her because, since she is actually blind and tracks people via their body odor, she is immune to his powers and can detect him regardless of whose body he's in. Also, if she is succesful, human agents will be substituted by robots, destroying the world he finds so comfortable. James Bond makes a cameo as an earlier generation robot. By luring Eve to Berlin, The Master hopes she will be captured by the soviets, and, once both sides have the technology to build spy robots, they will resort to using human agents too.
However, when everything is about to end happily for him, the final twist of the novel sheds a completely new light about it (I'll put it in spoiler in case you want to read it): Eve Gredner kills Irina, but no blood spills from the wound, but smoke and wires: Irina, The Master's only love, is a robot too. A robot which writes poetry and has mystic ecstasies. After this, the novel ends with The Master wondering if he will be a robot too: no definite answer is given.
Of course, the novel does not attempt to be realistic at all in its depiction of spionage and intelligence: it is the world of silly 60's spy movies and novels that Torrente depicts. Using this background for a serious and intellectual meditation on identity and what means being human is really original and it works: how can you have an identity if you don't even have a body for yourself? By which point does a robot start being human? and so on.
Of course, this makes the novel really dull if what you want is to read a spy thriller: there are pages and pages of inner monologue by The Master, and very well-written ponderings about human nature; while episodes that would be worth entire spy novels -the Master's years-long exploits infiltrating the Soviet Union until he reaches the body of a Politburo member, with the only intent of finding a scientist interned in a nuthouse- are only mentioned in passing in a few lines. This makes the novel strangely insatisfactory as a spy thriller after all the awesome background Torrente has set up, but it also is a great work of both using straight the usal spy fiction tropes and subverting them very well to achieve Torrente's actual aims.
There are some background details that would qualify this novel as AH:
-France still being in NATO in 1980, and NATO headquarters still being in Paris.
-Sweden and Austria being members of NATO.
-A mention of Operation Barbarossa having taken place in 1940.
-A passing character being referred to as "a member in the Lower Saxon army".
-James Bond exists, but he's american. And a robot.
-Sexual predator female robot spies.
Except for the last one, these details are only background inconsistencies that have no influence in the novel, and could be interpreted as Torrente either Not Doing His Research, or not caring at all about that. Instead of being a novel about an alternate world, this novel feels as if it came from an alternate world in which "serious" novelists (Torrente was a candidate for the Nobel prize for many years) take the conventions of "non-serious" literature and play them straight to write serious meditations on the nature of life and identity. The end result is so unique and bizarre that I couldn't help but sharing it with you.
So let's say you're a 70-year old writer with immense critical prestige. One of your novels, La saga/fuga de J.B. -a 700-page behemoth about a galician city whose existence is kept secret by a large government conspiracy- has been hailed as Spain's response to Joyce and Pynchon. What else can you do? Well, you write a spy-thriller starring a shapeshifting spy. With lasers, shady conspiracies, and sexual predator female robot spies who track their victims via body odor.
The background of the novel can be summarized as follows: since the early 70's, the intelligence services of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact have been baffled by the actions of an unknown agent, codenamed The master whose tracks fade in the mist. Really. Nothing is known about him. He is supposed to have acted in ten operations -among them helping a cypriot general to defect to the East; kidnapping three laotian princes to change the power balance in Asia- using methods that seem to defy natural laws. His allegiance appears unclear, helping sometimes the East or the West for unknown reasons. Since nobody can claim to have actually seen him, the most extended opinion in NATO is that he does not actually exist, and that he is only an invention of the intelligence services to cover up some embarrassing failures.
But the reader knows from the beginning that The Master actually exists, and that he has incredible powers, because a) he's the narrator and b)he informs us in the very first paragraph of his supernatural abilities: he is able to adopt at will the shape and personality of any person he makes eye contact with, turning the original's body into a hollow shell easy to hide. No explanation is given as to why he has this incredible power. He has changed personalities so often all over the world, that he lost his original shape long ago and is currently living in the body of CIA agent Max Maxwell, whose original body is hidden at a barn in Sardinia. He does not remember his family or early childhood, and his earliest remembrances are about his childhood in India as a guru's disciple, who taught him to use his power. Sometime in the 50's, living in the body of a british writer, he was recruited by the MI5, and since then he has been a spy, working for no one except himself.
This is the truly brilliant twist in this novel: given a character with such an amazing power -he can even turn into inanimated objects, and even atmospherical phenomena-, a standard spy thriller would turn him into a power-hungry wanker wishing to rule the world by himself, or into a superhero going all emo about his Great Responsability. The Master is not such a thing: he is a really likeable and human fellow, who loves art and poetry and does not feel his power as a burden or an excuse to see himself as a superhuman, but only as a tool to do his job, and that the reader actually appreciates. His fall in love with Irina Tchernova; a russian dissident poet exiled in Paris who is actually a KGB agent, and his abandonment of the spy world due to his last mission, is the core of the novel.
He does not care about ideology, or about either side's victory: for him, the spy world, with all its paranoia and hidden identities is the only place where he can feel happy and at home. With his power, he can manipulate both sides, not for his own gain, but to keep the equilibrium and prevent them from either starting WWIII and nuking the whole world, or becoming too weak and ending the cold war, and thus this world of spies he finds so comfortable. During the novel he undertakes two missions with the intent of sabotaging NATO's superiority: first, under the disguise of both a french navy captain and later a soviet agent, he steals NATO's newest strategic plan and sells it to the soviets. It is inside the body of agent Etvuchenko that he meets Irina, whom he immediately falls in love with. Later, with Irina's help, he will help Professor Fletcher's wife defect to East Berlin to meet him: Fletcher is a deeply christian scientist who has developed a laser that could be fired from orbit. Fearing that his invention would be used by NATO to annihilate the east, he has defected to the other side leaving his wife and projects behind. But these missions are only a Xanatos Gambit for The Master to hunt his deadliest enemy: Eve Gradner.
Miss Gradner is the most advanced offspring of the Andromaca Project, a CIA project to build a perfect robotic agent, to eliminate the human factor from intelligence operations (the book was written in 1983, one wonders if Torrente would have watched Blade Runner). The Master fears her because, since she is actually blind and tracks people via their body odor, she is immune to his powers and can detect him regardless of whose body he's in. Also, if she is succesful, human agents will be substituted by robots, destroying the world he finds so comfortable. James Bond makes a cameo as an earlier generation robot. By luring Eve to Berlin, The Master hopes she will be captured by the soviets, and, once both sides have the technology to build spy robots, they will resort to using human agents too.
However, when everything is about to end happily for him, the final twist of the novel sheds a completely new light about it (I'll put it in spoiler in case you want to read it): Eve Gredner kills Irina, but no blood spills from the wound, but smoke and wires: Irina, The Master's only love, is a robot too. A robot which writes poetry and has mystic ecstasies. After this, the novel ends with The Master wondering if he will be a robot too: no definite answer is given.
Of course, the novel does not attempt to be realistic at all in its depiction of spionage and intelligence: it is the world of silly 60's spy movies and novels that Torrente depicts. Using this background for a serious and intellectual meditation on identity and what means being human is really original and it works: how can you have an identity if you don't even have a body for yourself? By which point does a robot start being human? and so on.
Of course, this makes the novel really dull if what you want is to read a spy thriller: there are pages and pages of inner monologue by The Master, and very well-written ponderings about human nature; while episodes that would be worth entire spy novels -the Master's years-long exploits infiltrating the Soviet Union until he reaches the body of a Politburo member, with the only intent of finding a scientist interned in a nuthouse- are only mentioned in passing in a few lines. This makes the novel strangely insatisfactory as a spy thriller after all the awesome background Torrente has set up, but it also is a great work of both using straight the usal spy fiction tropes and subverting them very well to achieve Torrente's actual aims.