Marco Polo, If You Can – William F. Buckley Jr., 1982 ★½

Great Title, Shame about the Book

Can a capitalist lackey catch a break after crashing a spy plane in Khrushchev’s Russia? Will he effect a secret plot to tilt the balance of power for the free world, still reeling from Sputnik and the rise of the Iron Curtain? Or will ruthless interrogators wear him down?

I wish I could have cared more this time than the last time I read one of William F. Buckley Jr.’s spy novels starring his dashing alter-ego Blackford Oakes; that being The Story Of Henry Tod. Unfortunately, while the problems encountered this time were different, the end result was the same: a flat tale pocked by stale characters and coincidence.

Things start out bad for Oakes. It’s 1960, and he awaits summary justice in a Soviet courtroom. Deprived of creature comforts, he amuses himself noting the profusion of tobacco smoke in the otherwise austere setting. This draws the ire of the overbearing prosecutor, Gorchakov:

“See, Comrade Generals, the smirk on the face of the defendant? The smirk of fascism!”

At the dawn of the 1960s, the U-2 was a famous spy plane, not an Irish rock band. This was because, in 1960, Francis Gary Powers of the Central Intelligence Agency crashed one in the heart of Russia, setting off a major dispute resolved only when Powers was traded for Soviet spy Vilyam Fisher. A big embarrassment for the Eisenhower Administration; what if it had been part of a hidden plan? That is the nub of Buckley’s story.

Buckley quotes at the outset a 1975 interview of Senator J. William Fulbright in which the namesake of the famous scholarship pondered why the U-2 incident was allowed to happen just as relations with the U. S. S. R. were on the mend: “No one will ever know whether it was accidental or intentional.”

At risk of spoilers, it is clear early on Oakes, Powers’ fictional stand-in for the purpose of this novel, is no victim of accident. Just what Blackford intends is not explained for a while, and not well at that.

A big problem with Marco Polo is its overall murkiness, in part a product of Buckley’s famously discursive, rambling writing style. Buckley’s prose was well suited for political commentary, reflecting thoughtfulness and an appreciation for nuance. But it’s death in a spy novel. It was in Henry Tod, anyway, and so it is here as well.

The story simply takes too long to get airborne. After opening with Oakes in the dock, the narrative rewinds to the end of the prior novel, Who’s On First, with Oakes dismissed by the CIA. While Oakes immerses himself into civilian life, we pick up on another story in which secret minutes of President Eisenhower’s meetings with his national-security advisors are sent to Moscow for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s perusal.

“I am never too busy to read the minutes of a meeting of the National Insecurity Council of the United States,” Khrushchev chortles.

Then Khrushchev makes the colossal blunder of getting drunk with Eisenhower and inadvertently revealing what he knows. It’s hard to imagine the cagey Khrushchev of history spilling the beans, let alone letting himself get so drunk in the presence of a geopolitical rival to not notice his big slip, but you have to accept it for plot purposes.

This sends Eisenhower in a fury for the leak. He yells at his staff:

“Take a good look, gentlemen, because you’re not going to see ‘the famous Eisenhower smile’ again for a long time. I’m telling you, not for a long time.”

A chance to see real-life historical figures developed in detail, and parodied to varying extents, was a hallmark of the Blackford Oakes series. Back in the early 1980s, Buckley was somewhat unique that way. Marco Polo opens with a mordant disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Some of the figures who appear, however, do so under their own names.

Buckley’s handling of historical figures is mostly a pleasure throughout Marco Polo. But the fictional characters trip him up.

Oakes is annoyingly awesome in all respects, smart, witty, able to draw every female eye when he walks into a room. He writes appreciative essays remembering departed friends, speaks eloquently about the cause of freedom, and pauses while flying over Nagasaki to bow his head in silent prayer. A reviewer on Goodreads calls him a “Mary Sue,” i. e. an impossibly perfect protagonist; he certainly is here.

Francis Gary Powers in the dock after being captured in his downed U-2 spy plane. William F. Buckley Jr. creates an alternate reality in which the pilot is in on his own capture. Image from http://www.robinsonlibrary.com/history/eastern/russia/history/soviet/60trial.htm 

Oakes’ main friend in the novel, Michael Bolgiano, is similarly uncomplicated. He’s just glad to strike a blow for the cause:

“I’m just – I guess – just happy. I’m working on the right team. I’m sitting a couple of miles from where Hitler finally blasted his own brains out. After initiating policies that, among other things, reminded my pop that he was half Jewish and therefore not quite human, and certainly not to be trusted to head a labor union. So I’m spending my life as a professional.”

“What do you mean ‘professional’?”

“A professional soldier. Working against…well, I guess I’d call them Hitler’s successors – why not? – though in fact the Commies antedated Hitler.”

Such dialogue is not only stilted, but egregiously portentous in “I feel like I’m gonna live forever” style. You know something bad’s about to happen to a guy who says something like that as he assists the main protagonist. And it does.

A proud reactionary in many things, Buckley was similarly so when it came to producing spy novels. He was reacting against the moral equivalency often portrayed between East and West, between communism and freedom. He singled out Len Deighton and John le Carré as examples of annoying fence-sitting.  

Such an idea is welcome to me, and needed doing. But Buckley wasn’t the right man for the job. He practiced his craft with a rapier wit, not a stiletto or a garotte, and it shows.

[BIG SPOILER COMING] When we get to the part of the novel where Michael meets his maker, it not only takes forever to happen but does so in a clumsy, confusing way. For a while, the reader has known that Michael’s father was passing off secrets to the Soviet Union. Now Michael knows it, too. A Berlin contact of Blackford agrees to meet with him and Michael to pass on secret film footage showing members of the spy ring responsible for Eisenhower’s war-room leak. Then the contact pulls out a gun and tells Blackford and Michael he’s selling them out. Michael jumps in front of Blackford and takes the bullet, apparently grateful in the end to absolve some internal sense of family guilt. Blackford dashes off with the footage, afterwards piecing together how Michael’s father fit into the Soviet spy plot.

The long sequence left me with a lot of questions. Why, if the contact was just planning to betray Blackford and Michael, did he bother getting real footage of the spy ring? Why would he confront two highly competent spies, and boast of their impending executions, without arranging for any backup?

Evan Hunter, the crime novelist best known for the 87^th Precinct series he wrote as Ed McBain, reviewed Marco Polo, If You Can for The New York Times in 1982 and notes how the narrative presents Michael throughout this sequence as silent and hidden by shadow. Hunter sensed the strong possibility Michael was being impostured, a twist to be revealed by novel’s end. But the episoide is never revisited in Marco Polo. “[E]ither he later lost interest in pursuing such a tack, or else he forgot to pay off what he’d originally planned,” Hunter concludes. [BIG SPOILER ENDS]

Buckley goes off on other strange tangents. He lays out a long sequence about a copier being used to purloin classified documents, spending several pages explaining the myriad intricacies of said apparatus, apparently enjoying the mechanical marvelousness of it all. He even spends a page of his acknowledgements thanking the Xerox expert he consulted about it. Meanwhile, the deceitful character stealing the documents, a true believer in the Marxist cause developed in some detail, slips out of the narrative with the briefest of mentions.

As far as the reason for Oakes’ trip over the Soviet Union, and why he subjects himself to capture, it is explained decently enough but feels like a big gamble for minimal gain. After all, when Powers did crash, the gift of a sophisticated, intact U-2 to the Soviets was seen as a major blow. Here it’s just a byproduct for setting up the disinformation, a vulnerable gambit indeed as the pilot is left alive in Russian hands and completely in the know as to what is really going on.

This could have set up a riveting, suspenseful torture sequence in the vein of Casino Royale. Certainly such a scene would be in keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel, which presents the Soviets as unblinkingly ruthless villains. Instead Buckley explains the torture as having already happened and bravely endured by Blackford.

Say one thing about Marco Polo, If You Can, as Hunter did in his Times review: It’s a helluva good title, capturing a sense of show-offy, globetrotting ebullience I for one associate with the singular Mr. Buckley. Unfortunately, if you are want a spy novel to take you on an enjoyable ride, Marco Polo can’t.