I don't know if it is a coincidence, but this year longtime friends and sometime rivals Calista and Alan have separately published novels called, respectively, The Collaborator and The Collaborators. Naturally I devoured them both—in this post I'll review Calista's latest effort, and in my next post I'll review Alan's.
The Collaborator is written in spare, unadorned prose. I found it to have a staccato quality—sudden moments of drama or revelation punctuate a calm, somewhat melancholy resting state. Like a calm sea voyage suddenly blaring with the warning of torpedoes—but more on that later. At times the novel felt excessively dreary and philosophical, but I soon learned that it was at exactly such moments that I should expect the next torpedo to arrive.
The story is set in wartime Zurich, where Tom Cullen lives with his daughter Mary. Cullen is an Irish expatriate, a veteran of the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War (on the Anti-Treaty side). Cullen has maintained contacts with fellow hardliners in the IRA, but he is no longer active in the movement. He runs a small bar popular with refugees and outcasts, including deserters from both sides, many of whom have entered Switzerland illegally. The bar scenes have a vivid cinematic quality, inspiring Dave to describe the novel as "The Magic Mountain meets Casablanca."
It is a rowdy, colorful existence, but Cullen does not seem to find any joy in it. A morose and sardonic man with a tendency to alienate those who care about him, Cullen mostly dwells on the perceived slights and indignities that he suffered at the hands of his rivals and former friends. ("Sullen Cullen," I took to calling him.) He feels forgotten and unimportant—never more than a bit player in history, he senses that even his minor role has come to an unsatisfactory end.
That quickly changes when he is approached by men claiming to represent the Abwehr, Germany's military intelligence service. Cullen's cosmopolitan clientèle and his Fenian contacts make him a promising conduit for information about the Allies, particularly about their convoys across the Atlantic. Here at last is Cullen's chance to strike a blow against his first and truest enemy, the British Empire. (Whereas Cullen is conflicted about the Irish Civil War, particularly the death of his boyhood hero Michael Collins, he has never felt a trace of sympathy for the British.)
But Cullen is no monster, and so ensues the quiet moral struggle that forms the heart of the book. Too intelligent and intellectually honest to equate the British Empire with the Third Reich, Cullen considers contacting British intelligence in order to double-cross the Germans. (He would much prefer to work for the Americans, but the U.S. espionage apparatus, at least in Zurich, is pathetic. Meanwhile, so adroit are the British spies that Cullen can't rule out the possibility that his "Abwehr" contacts are actually British agents.) But the idea of working for the British stirs up terrible memories, long repressed, of what Cullen and his compatriots did when they discovered collaborators in their midst.
So the past continues to weigh on Cullen, but with a new valence. Every night in his bar he sees Hitler's victims, and every morning he walks the streets, reliving the depredations of the British, the partition of Ireland, the murder of his friends and family. But then he flinches as he imagines torpedoes finding their mark, the sudden jolt of the deck under frightened Canadian feet, smoke in the air, blood in the water. He goes in circles, trying and failing to find some way to make a fit of his wildly discordant loyalties, to his country, to his morality, to his fragmenting sense of self.
I had better leave it there. Partly I don't want to reveal what Cullen decides to do, but more importantly, we must remember that Cullen is a fictional character and as such his decision has no implications except for the fate of his fictional soul. It is the struggle that matters, and here there are no surprises to reveal, just a realistic and wrenching portrayal of a man caught in the trap of history, like a fly in a saucer of milk or coffee.
