Sydney Pollack used to have a saying: "In a movie, you can watch two characters fall in love for an hour, and you can watch them fall out of love for an hour, but you can only watch them in love for about five minutes."
He should know, as the director of "The Way We Were", "3 Days of the Condor", "Out of Africa" and other classic love stories on film.
As far as I know Pollack never met Charles McCarry, the American novelist whose great series of spy thrillers featuring his protagonist Paul Christopher are elevated from their genre by a deep and subtle understanding of the mysteries of the human heart.
But McCarry also knows a thing or two about lovers.
In "The Secret Lovers", there are two sets of secret love affairs revealed; the plot revolves around a smuggled Russian manuscript by a Solzhenitsyn-like author, the publication of which in the West will be both a stinging international rebuke to Soviet totalitarianism as well as an almost certain death sentence for its author.
As the narrative unfolds we come to understand that the legendary and revered veteran secret agent who conceived of this operation was in fact a secret ex-lover of the author, and his desire to immortalize his lover competes with his deeper desire to sacrifice him, and ultimately expose his youthful affair that represents his betrayal of heart and country.
As Al Pacino put it in Godfather 3 "Sometimes the desire to confess can be overwhelming."
The other set of secret lovers in the novel are actually a married couple, McCarry's alter-ego Paul Christopher, whose new wife Cathy finds the compartmentalized life of being married to a spy so intolerable that she takes on a series of lovers in order to become more like her husband, with the tragic notion, for herself and their marriage, that through developing her own secret life she will come to better understand and love him.
"I'm doing what I'm doing, Paul, to see if I can become you. If I can, surely you'll understand love, and I'll understand you."
But McCarry's double-entendre title seems to also convey a third meaning, as all of these secret lovers, and in fact almost all of the characters in the book, are lovers of secrets; one could almost say they are in love with their secrets more than they are in love with each other.
Or as McCarry puts it in the novel:
"Cathy was a silent about her lovers as Christopher about his spies. The mystery had begun to run both ways."
In the end, secrets consume everyone in the novel, except Christopher, perhaps because, as his wife intuitively understands, he has already been consumed.
"I wish I had another life, the way you do, Paul. Maybe I could stay inside it, as cold as you, and learn the secret you told me."
"The secret?"
"Of how to love, and feel nothing."
A highly recommended read.
Enjoy!
william
