Thriller raises stakes
Cold Victory Karl Marlantes Grove
Louise Koski, the pivotal character in Karl Marlantes's Cold Victory, a brisk geopolitical thriller set in Finland at the beginning of the Cold War, is in over her head.
She grew up in Edmond, Okla., was an “enthusiastic Delta Gamma” at the state university and before the Second World War had never travelled east of the Mississippi River.
She'd been isolated as an
Army wife while her husband, Arnie, earned a Purple Heart and a Silver Star in the war. Now he's been promoted to military attaché to the American legation in Helsinki, a job, Louise realizes, that requires two people:
“His end was gathering military intelligence. Her end was providing the social lubricant and connections that made his job easier.”
If they're successful, Arnie will make colonel. “Screw this up,” a diplomat's wife tells her, “and your husband's career is over.”
If these stakes aren't high enough, add the tension in Finland at the beginning of 1947: Eight years before, the Soviet Union invaded, and though the Finns fought relentlessly without help from the West and inflicted massive casualties, they ultimately had to give up 10 per cent of their land in the truce that followed.
When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union a year later, the Finns joined the Nazis to regain their lost territory. But after the
Siege of St. Petersburg failed and Hitler retreated to Germany, Stalin pushed into Finland again, facing the same dauntless force and staggering losses, but in the end gaining even more Finnish territory than before.
Cold Victory begins soon after the second armistice, but there's little sense of peace. The Finns and Russians hate each other. They both distrust the Americans, and the feeling is mutual.
Spies and secret police are everywhere in the gloomy streets, listening in on bugged apartments. Louise speaks little of the native language and no Russian, and her childlessness at 30 makes her look with intense longing and sorrow at the thousands of refugees, many of them orphans, pouring into Helsinki.
At a New Year's Eve party at the Soviet envoy's residence, Arnie reunites with a Russian officer, Mikhail Bobrov, with whom he'd bonded in Austria during the last days of the war. While Arnie and Mikhail, now military attaché to the Soviet legation, catch up over shots of vodka, Louise meets Mikhail's alluring wife, Natalya, who is icy at first. But over the course of the evening, they find a shared passion for French literature and the French language, through which they'll communicate and eventually collaborate.
As the vodka alchemizes into foolish courage, Arnie and Mikhail come up with a grand wager: a 10-day, 500-mile ski race at the end of which “the loser has to tell the winner that his troops are the best in the world.”
Much of the second half of the novel revolves around this race, an almost-too-tidy metaphor for the Cold War competition between the world's two superpowers that would dominate the second half of the 20th century.