Jake Kerridge

THE BERLIN EXCHANGE by Joseph Kanon

320pp, Simon & Schuster, £16.99, ebook £9.99

★★★★☆

Among the dozens of spy novelists who have set their books during the first decades of the Cold War, many connoisseurs would place the American author Joseph Kanon as silver medallist – behind John le Carré, but way ahead of the rest of the field. (And that’s with the handicap of lacking le Carré’s direct experience of his subject, unless Kanon, born in 1946, happens to have been a teenage espionage prodigy.) It’s a measure of Kanon’s confidence that he begins his 10th novel with a set-piece taking place at the Berlin Wall in 1963 – the territory staked out by le Carré in his masterpiece, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, published that year.

The protagonist, Martin Keller, is an American physicist who was encouraged by his East German wife to spy for the Soviets, spilling nuclear secrets picked up from his work at Los Alamos and later at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Britain; after 10 years in an English jail, he finds himself at the start of this story, being escorted over the Wall into East Berlin to be reunited with his family, as part of a prisoner exchange.

Keller is desperate to spend time with the 11-year-old son who’s grown up without him, but his old Soviet handler wants to send him off snooping again, spying on an eminent scientist who may have plans to defect to the West. He also finds himself mixed up in the activities of his now-ex-wife’s current husband, dodgy lawyer Kurt, who organises the return of political prisoners to their homelands in exchange for hard cash: a real-life secret practice, as Kanon informs us in an afterword, which did much to keep the East German economy afloat.

This portrait of a man discovering too late that you can’t set your own retirement date from the espionage world is thoroughly absorbing, a thoughtful and subtle evocation of a place and era, with occasional invigorating bursts of violence. Kanon’s trademark pared-down prose verges on the discomfitingly oblique at times, but when he’s at his best you get the rare sense of a writer whose style, plot and characters have been perfectly aligned to convey his vision of the world.