From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
He Has Seen
The Future:
It's in His Work
Charles McCarry's novels keep coming true. And his new book is about the end of the world.
Charles McCarry's latest novel, "Old Boys," starts with the revelation that Jesus Christ may have been an unwitting agent in a Roman covert-action operation gone wrong. If this seems far-fetched, please pause to consider Mr. McCarry's record.
In 1979 he wrote a book, "The Better Angels," about an Arab princeling, made rich by oil, who decides to wage a terrorist war on America and Israel. His weapon of choice: passenger jetliners, blown up in flight over major metropolitan centers.
His 1995 novel, "Shelley's Heart," describes the events surrounding the presidential election that would take place five years later. In Mr. McCarry's fictional world, the 2000 elections result in a Senate that is split 50-50 and a disputed outcome that hangs on a few thousand votes in a single state. An impeachment also figures in the tale. The state in question is Illinois, not Florida, but this bit of literary license can be forgiven, considering Illinois' long tradition of voter fraud. The title of the book, by the way, derives from the name of a fictional secret society at Yale that is central to the events surrounding Mr. McCarry's fictional anticipation of the 2000 election--a hint, perhaps, of the all-Skull-&-Bones contest looming in 2004.
Nor is "Old Boys" Mr. McCarry's first attempt at reinterpreting the past. His second novel, "The Tears of Autumn" (1974), details an alternative theory of the Kennedy assassination, among the first revisionist versions of that momentous event. The novel's plot, though, has an elegant simplicity to it, and a clever logic, that puts Oliver Stone's wild fantasies to shame.
Charles McCarry, in a word, is a novelist with an uncanny imagination, and a compelling one, even if his work is less known than it should be. His masterpiece, "The Last Supper," is a Cold War tale that ranks with the best of John le Carré--but without the moral cynicism. Now 70, Mr. McCarry knows spies, having worked for the CIA 40 years ago. The chief protagonist in most of his books, Paul Christopher, does not carry a gun or play card games with supercriminals in casinos. Instead he does what most real spooks do. He tries to gather information, make contacts and influence events, and occasionally to suborn those who work for the other side.
Mr. McCarry notes that when "The Better Angels" was published 25 years ago, one reviewer lamented that his premise--that terrorists would use passenger-filled airliners as tools of terror--was so incredible as to be an obstacle to the reader's suspension of disbelief. Mr. McCarry knew better. Does that mean we should believe him when he, or rather the characters in his latest novel, suggest that Christ was a pawn in a spy story? Is this a conspiracy theory to compete with the one in "The Da Vinci Code"?
Well, not exactly. The "report" that turns up in his new novel lays out a convincing case, but Mr. McCarry knows enough about bureaucratic backside-coverers to suggest that the report's Roman author may be spinning his bosses, trying to make a messy mishap in Jerusalem look like a well-thought-out plan. More worrisome, for readers aware of Mr. McCarry's record for anticipating the future, is the present-day plot of "Old Boys." It involves the same terrorist he invented in 1979, still alive and seeking to get his hands on the Roman spy's report--and a dozen Soviet-era backpack nukes. Uh-oh.
As for Mr. McCarry himself, he seems undisturbed by his powers of prophecy. In a phone interview just after 9/11, I asked him how it felt to write novels that kept coming true. "Well, I'm working on a book about the end of the world right now," he deadpanned. "My publisher just called and said, 'For God's sake, Charles. Don't do it!'" Whether the plot of "Old Boys" ever gets quite as far as Armageddon I'll leave readers to discover for themselves. Don't wait too long, though.
Soon after "Tears of Autumn" was published, Mr. McCarry was accosted at a dinner party by a woman outraged at his portrayal of Paul Christopher's self-destructive first wife, calling it "male chauvinist propaganda." Mr. McCarry asked her why she disliked the character of the wife so much. "After a moment of angry silence," Mr. McCarry wrote in relating the incident, "the woman threw half a glass of Burgundy on my best gray suit and replied, 'Because I used to be just like her.'"
Just so. He gets the past right, it seems, as well as the future.
Mr. Carney is the deputy editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe.
