We are reading Don Quixote for my NYPL book group and I’ve whipped through two David Ignatius novels in rapid succession this week as I procrastinate on my more difficult reading. (The Quantum Spy was the other one.)

I’m new to David Ignatius and the only other spy books I’ve read are the Gray Man series by Mark Greaney. Ignatius is not all action and adventure like Greaney, it’s more of a kooky (spooky) travel log with a great deal of administrative detail on the CIA. I gather that Ignatius spent time as a journalist working “with” the CIA, but after reading this book which goes into some detail on how the CIA recruit agents, it’s hard to believe he didn’t also work for them.

Siro focuses on the late 70s and a rogue group of operatives at different stages of their careers who see an opportunity to end the Cold War by igniting religious fervor among the Muslim groups across Central Asia. (This is post Iran hostage, pre Afghanistan.) They set up operations in a phony carpet store Karpetland (spelled with a K because “Nobody in his right mind would think of carpets and ask the operator for the ‘K’s‘”) in Rockville, Maryland. Much of the book focuses on the logistics of their maneuvering and it is this administrative part of the story which rings most authentic. Although the narrative arc of the book is ostensibly the generation shift at the Agency and the new sense of morality represented by the younger agents, this was less interesting than the minutiae of the day to day life at the CIA and the journeys into the edges of the Soviet Union –   Tashkent, Yerevan, and Istanbul. 

My fiction group most recently read Scribe. The novel takes place in an unexplained war-torn landscape in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The main character, an unnamed woman, has somehow manage to eke out an isolated existence in her decaying family homestead, supporting herself by providing writing services to the “Uninvited” refugees who mass on the borders of her property. Then one day she is visited by a stranger named Hendricks, who not only wants her to write his story, but also to leave the safety of her home to deliver it. As the narrative progresses, the uncanny becomes increasingly fantastic. We see our narrator possessed by her dead sister, hallucinate the evil intentions of her neighbors, and get visited by a spirit child guide. What seems to start out as historical fiction slides into fantasy with elements of magic and mysticism.

There are moments of great poetry in the writing but I felt an underlying disorientation in the placelessness and timelessness of the narrative. What has created this post-apocalyptic future/past that has so devastated culture and society? How do the magical elements of the story play into the underlying pre-story? These questions left me (and my reading mates) feeling a little genre confused. So even though we all described “settling into” the reading of this novel and accepting the journey it wove, we were left with many questions.