Trevanian wrote three anti-hero spy genre stories before moving on to more personal, psychological tales (The Summer of Katya). The first two, The Eiger Sanction and The Loo Sanction, featured Jonathon Hemlock, art professor, mountain climber, bon-vivant and counter-assassin. Hemlock having burned himself out at the end of The Loo Sanction, Trevanian was faced with the need for a new anti-hero to write about.
What he created was Nicholai Hel, master of languages, sexual sophisticate, Go champion (the game, not the movie), cryptographer, spelunker (cave explorer), and silently effective killer for hire (if he likes the target).
Plot
The first section of the book introduces us to all the major characters, including a lengthy early history of Nicholai Hel, born to Russian and German parents, his childhood in Shanghai, war years in Japan as an Occidental, surviving in post-war occupation by the United States with his wits, and then....
an act of kindness puts him at odds with the intelligence service of the United States for the first time, and his life takes a rather violent turn.
The plot of the novel is intricate. A combination of coincidence, Hel's past history, the geopolitics of oil and a lust for revenge cause the lumbering but effective American intelligence agencies (now controlled by agents of The Mother Company, an amalgam of powerful monolithic industrial powers) to rise up against a retired Hel.
Hel is weary with the game, and struggles against involvement in this latest manifestation of it. A sense of honour for a dead friend forces his hand. Strange concepts of honour is a familiar theme in Trevanian's spy novels. Hemlock in The Eiger Sanction dispatched a former friend for betraying that friendship. Hel finds himself bound by his code of honour to place himself and his lifestyle in danger.
The writing
Trevanian should be required reading for spy novelists who take the craft of spying too seriously. A well rounded writer, Trevanian shows that he possesses detailed, sometimes arcane knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. Either Trevanian is a first-rate researcher, or he's writing from personal experience about intelligence work, caving, life in Japan, philosophy, and gardening. It is this dense knowledge that makes Shibumi so enjoyable a read, beyond the excitement generated by the brief action sequences.
Throughout Shibumi are sprinkled Trevanian's opinions on everything under the sun. They are usually caustic, sometimes racist, almost always generalizations, and occasionally hilarious. His remarks about the national characteristics of drivers (Italian drivers, according to Hel, use cars as an extension of their penis, British drivers use them as a substitute) while probably inaccurate, are amusing. He has a thousand ways of expressing disdain, and he uses them all. The most positive thought he expresses about the United States is that it's a good place to get a snack.
We first meet Hel in person somewhere in the Pyrenees, underneath the Spanish border, deep inside a cave he's exploring. A very lengthy exploration of the cave, interesting by itself, serves to let us get to know Hel and his friend, Le Cagot, a Basque separatist and fellow caver. Le Cagot, a blowhard extrovert, neatly balances Hel's insularity. The exploration of the cave can be seen as a metaphor for Hel's personality, full of depths not seen from the surface. Quiet on the surface, but a jumble of rock and rivers beneath. That Hel spends much time under the earth in his rich interior world is reflected in the real world by his calm, and self-awareness. In contrast with Jonathon Hemlock, (a contrast alluded to by Trevanian), Hel's caving engages his intellect without the resultant publicity and glory usually attained by mountaineers.
Hel's disdain for just about everything except for his friends and intellectual pursuits, and his residual bitterness at treatment during his brutalization at the hands of the American intelligence service keep him from attaining peace. Peace, for Hel, is achieved in the form of mystical transport. Trevanian's strength as a writer enables us to see his losing of this mystical transport (a concept alien to most of us, steeped in the Western tradition of logic) as a tragedy. Trevanian helps us see past familiar conventions of success (killing of all your enemies, living happily ever after), and in the end, we actually care whether Hel finds his inner peace in facing an uncertain future.
Failings
Occasionally, Trevanian stumbles in his writing, usually as a result of laying it on a bit thick about stupidity at all levels of government. A jarringly out of character insult here, an extraneous bit of slapstick indulged over there; it's not enough to detract from the effectiveness of the book as a whole, but the book would likely be a more elegant construct if they were excised.
Shibumi also suffers a bit from the cute name disease. An assistant to the controller of the intelligence agency is named Miss Swivven, for example (look up swive in Oxford's New Shorter Dictionary for a chuckle). The disease seems not to have progressed as far as in Trevanian's previous novels, however.
Ultimately, Shibumi succeeds on many more levels than it fails. As an "action" novel, and as a constructed , almost mannered, spy novel, it is a resounding success. Well worth your time.
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