Tod Hoffman

If there's one thing The Spy Within convinced me of, it's that Tod Hoffman can write.

The prose in this book was a joy to read; Hoffman has an excellent command of the English language, and if he wrote fiction, I'd be all over it. There were turns of phrase that were pure poetry, as well as elegantly executed figures of speech that enhanced the full work. At times, Hoffman's expertise with language was all I needed to carry me along.

Unfortunately, the narrative falls down in a few different ways. Hoffman takes the reader on a number of side trips into the world of espionage, presumably to provide a more complete background for the Larry Chin case. These side trips, however, come packed with extraneous information, and names and dates are thrown out so rapid fire that more than once I found myself backtracking just to try to pick up and follow all the different connections; I seriously considered sketching out relationship/family trees to keep everything straight in my head, but found that with the exception of the section on the Bernard Boursicot case -- which happens to be the basis for the play (and subsequent movie) M. Butterfly -- I didn't care enough about the intricacies of these secondary relationships to follow through. At one point, I found myself backtracking to the beginning of the book to find information that would explain the identity of someone Hoffman had suddenly dropped into the narrative, and not able to find that information, I simply gave up, certain that this unidentified person would drift out of the novel soon enough to no great loss. I wasn't wrong.

The fact is, unlike a fictional novel, real life is messy, and it is no doubt difficult for a non-fiction writer to sculpt real world happenings into some sort of linear form, but that is, indeed, the task set before Hoffman, and instead of separating the wheat from the chaff and providing a streamlined, coherent version of the Larry Chin case, the narrative meanders down a myriad of winding paths before returning to the main thrust. At times I had to wonder if Hoffman was finding himself too caught up in accurately representing the tiniest of details, no matter how small and tangential, to the point where he was unable to untangle himself from them, or if there simply wasn't enough substance to Larry Chin's duplicity to carry the reader through a full novel.

Hoffman also has the tendency to editorialize. This tendency is a bit offputting, as so much of the book is consumed with minute details which are then swept away in swathes of narrative in which he presumes that so-and-so felt this, and so-and-so thought that, but provides no real proof to back up these claims. Given how well-researched and footnoted the rest of the book is, this is a startling disruption of tone that repeats itself over and over again. The narrative would have benefited from Hoffman making a choice: is this a dramatization of a real event, or an accurate record of the Chin case?

Regardless, those things are forgivable sins, especially as the novel unfailingly returns to Chin each time the reader's attention threatens to waver. What I found actively distressing, however, was Hoffman's inability to write about the handful of women involved outside of a sexual context. This is, of course, a book written with a male audience in mind, and I did not expect anything less; I read and enjoy plenty of stories that are aimed at an audience I am not part of, and often enjoy them much more than those written for my particular demographic. The fact that The Spy Within is aimed at a male audience and the major players involved are male does not excuse using women's sexuality as shorthand for their personalities. Female agents, when described at all, are talked about in terms of appearance; a stark contrast to the deeper sketches of the hard-working, intelligent male agents involved (who come complete with quirks, faults and strengths). One of the few named females occupying a position of authority is defined in terms of her unwillingness to sleep with and become mistress to the man who outed Chin, rather than any characteristics that would be far more relevant to her job. More shocking still, Hoffman writes off a girl Chin assaults with something suspiciously approaching the old "she was asking for it" chestnut through some truly disturbing editorializing of her thoughts and feelings. Even Shi Pei Pu, Bernard Boursicot's lover, is treated in a similar manner, presumably because his queerness and gender-slippage marks him as effeminate, and therefore an exotic sexual figure. Hoffman would do well to examine his thumbnail sketches of women and look beyond titillation or definition-by-genitalia in future works. While I'm sure many readers will not find the faint whiff of sexism that pervades this novel terribly bothersome, it became quite a struggle to get past each new entrance of someone's wife or mistress, who would no doubt be described in relation to whether or not she's sexually attractive to men, and then just as quickly dropped from the narrative again.

The Spy Within left me envious of Hoffman's writing skills, but overall, it lacked a coherency of plot and respect for many of the characters inside. I would love to see him write something in the spy novel genre, completely fictionalized, but I fear he'd find himself bound up in gender issues should he attempt to include any women at all. While the Larry Chin case is an interesting one, I'm not sure Hoffman provided the sort of narrative that carries readers through from cover to cover, and I suspect those who would enjoy this book best are those already well-steeped in the history of espionage. As much as I enjoy a good spy novel, I can't count myself amongst that number.… (plus d'informations)