No Escape

By John Skow

THE FOURTH PROTOCOL by Frederick Forsyth Viking; 389 pages; $17.95

Reality is nasty stuff, tending as it does toward onrushing appointments for root-canal surgery and tuition bills. So it is extremely sad to report that one of the century's most dependable mechanisms for reality avoidance, the many-times-retold spy thriller whose gray secret is the mole in the British intelligence service, is in deep trouble. This is not really the fault of Frederick Forsyth, whose prose and plotting are no clunkier than those of other literary spy masters who borrowed the mole genre after John le Carre was through with it.

"I'm looking for a pattern, Sir Nigel," Forsyth's hero, Agent John Preston, reports to his boss. "It's all I can look for. A pattern of entries and exits by the same passport number. . . . It's not much, but it's all I have."

The doom that Preston is trying to avert is fearsome enough. Some especially nasty types in the Kremlin have hatched a plot to smuggle a small nuclear bomb into England in pieces, assemble the thing and set it off near an American cruise-missile base. The physical damage will not be devastating, except in the immediate area of a few square miles. But the Soviets hope that the explosion will be taken for that of a U.S. nuke gone haywire. Leftists and peaceniks will then redouble their anti-American baying, and the Labor Party, dominated by pro-Soviet operatives, will take over England in the next election.

It is puzzling why the villainy, and Preston's dogged efforts to cope, should fail as escape literature. The plot of The Fourth Protocol, including the burrowings of the mole who tries to foil Preston, is no more stale or unbelievable than most. Freshness and credibility, in any case, are not requirements. Perhaps the reason is that Preston is without a side. Le Carre would have given him a faithless wife, or at least an ingrown toenail, to tease the mind with antiheroic irony.

Still, even a cardboard hero should not be fatal in the reality-avoidance game. The reader is willing to spend a couple of evenings in Preston's numbing company if doing so will let him put off thinking about that oral surgery or those dunning letters from school. What overstrains Forsyth's vehicle to the point of collapse, when other thrillers no less dim clatter on dependably to their conclusions, may be that the author has weighty ideological points to make. His first intention is not to write an entertainment but to preach a political sermon. Its burden is that leftists and peaceniks really are fools whose habitual prating endangers civilization. Forsyth puts forward this view, at the cost of stopping all narrative action, in a twelve-page position paper. It is supposedly a memo from the real-life mole Kim Philby to the head of the Soviet Communist Party.

Such Op-Ed argumentation has begun to appear, alas, in other thrillers. Its most notable recent use was in General Sir John Hackett's two books noisily predicting a third world war. But Hackett's purpose was not to write novels; it was to use the techniques of fiction to argue his case for a buildup in conventional arms. An escape narrative must be nimbler. In The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and his later novels, Le Carre gave the spy thriller all the ideological baggage that the pockets of a trench coat could handle, namely the message that espionage is a dirty business whose dirt is fairly evenly distributed on both sides. Forsyth was darkly entertaining in The Day of the Jackal, but his new book is tract writing, and its tendentious guff leaves the reader where he started, unwilling to believe and unable to escape. --By John Skow