In Olen Steinhauer’s novel The Tourist, Milo Weaver has tried to leave his old life of secrets and lies behind by giving up his job as a “tourist” for the CIA—an undercover agent with no home, no identity—and working a desk at the CIA’s New York headquarters. But staying retired from the field becomes impossible when the arrest of a long-sought-after assassin sets off an investigation into one of Milo’s oldest colleagues and friends. With new layers of intrigue being exposed in his old cases, he has no choice but to go back undercover and find out who’s been pulling the strings once and for all.
What makes Milo Weaver so interesting as a character is that, as far as spy novel protagonists go, he is the anti-James Bond. Unlike Bond, Jason Bourne, and other literary/cinematic super-spies, Weaver is flawed, making many mistakes and errors in judgment along the way. In short, he acts like a real person caught up in extraordinary circumstances who, although competent and experienced, has to make split second life and death decisions.
Those decisions have a psychological impact. When we first meet Weaver, in a flashback that opens the book, he is mentally unhinged by his life as a tourist. He is sustained by booze and amphetamines and takes suicidal risks, subconsciously trying to end his disconnected, rudderless existence. The day is Sept. 11, 2001.
The novel doesn’t go there, thankfully, but the after-effects of that day are still rippling in the back ground as we jump to the present. Weaver is a “travel agent” managing tourist operations from an office in New York. From here the story is firmly grounded in a post-9/11 world of inter-security agency jurisdiction rivalries, press-leaked scandals, and justifying the agency’s existence in the face of looming budget cuts. Also, flying in the face of Bond’s bed-hopping alpha male archetype, Weaver is now happily married with a child. When the interrogation with the aforementioned assassin he had long been pursuing pulls him back into tourism, Weaver’s efforts to hold onto his family and stay grounded, while trying to do a job that doesn’t mesh with stability and connection, carries as much weight and tension in the story as resolving the main plot.
Steinhauer, while still crafting a thriller that’s entertaining as hell, proves himself a talented literary writer who can turn a phrase and craft great prose as well as move the plot along. He also creates truly multi-faceted and memorable characters. There are great twists and surprises and nothing and no one can be taken at face value. One of the best new characters I’ve read in a long time is German spymaster Erika Schwartz, who is 300-plus pounds, in her mid- to late-fifties, and ends each day with a snickers bar and a cheap bottle of Riesling. She figures prominently in the second book of the planned trilogy, The Nearest Exit, and is far from the caricature you assume her to be when she is first introduced.
Unlike another recent popular trilogy, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl who…” Millennium series, everything means something and is important to the story. I ripped through the first two books and felt a crushing sense of withdrawal and longing when I realized that I would probably have to wait at least a year to read the as-yet-unpublished concluding book in the series. If you like smart, fast paced thrillers, I recommend The Tourist to you without hesitation.
