The Mole: The Cold War Memoir of Winston Bates
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The fictitious memoir of an unlikely foreign spy planted in Washington, D.C., in the years after World War II
Recruited by a foreign power in postwar Paris and sent to Washington, Winston Bates is without training or talent. He might be a walking definition of the anti-spy. Yet he makes his way onto the staff of the powerful Senator Richard Russell, head of the Armed Services Committee. From that perch, Bates has extensive and revealing contacts with the Dulles brothers, Richard Bissell, Richard Helms, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Alsop, Walter Lippman, Roy Cohn, and even Ollie North to name but a few of the historical players in the American experience Winston befriends—and haplessly betrays for a quarter century.
A comedy of manners set within the circles of power and information, Peter Warner's The Mole is a witty social history of Washington in the latter half of the twentieth century that presents the question: How much damage can be done by the wrong person in the right place at the right time?
Written as Winston's memoir, The Mole details the American Century from an angle definitely off center. From Suez, the U-2 Crash, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and Watergate, the novel is richly and factually detailed, marvelously convincing, and offers the reader a slightly subversive character searching for identity and meaning (as well as his elusive handler) in a heady time during one of history's most defining eras.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lightweight, clever second novel from Warner (Lifestyle) adopts the form of memoir to tell the story of modest, unassuming Winston Bates in his unlikely career as a Canadian spy in Washington, D.C., from the 1950s to the 1980s. Bates doesn't feel too guilty about the job; his handler assures him that he's not really spying because "the Americans are our friends, right?" Zelig-like, he encounters a who's who of Washington society (Roy Cohn, Walter Lippmann, and many others) in a story that seemingly encompasses every major post-WWII foreign policy and political event, including the Suez Crisis, Sputnik, the Bay of Pigs, and Wa tergate. The result is a satirical perspective on American political life that unsurprisingly concludes that personal gain generally trumps the common good. But some readers may find the farcical conceit too large a leap of faith and wish that more comedy could have been wrung from the premise. A necessarily episodic narrative (with some clumsy flashbacks) diminishes the book's momentum. None theless, Warner's prose is first-rate, and his research is prodigious, which adds credibility (14 archival photographs help).