Henry Porter's well-informed engrossing thrillers have previously dealt with today's headlines; Brandenburg is a powerful novel of espionage and betrayal set a mere decade and a half ago, in what is now an entirely different world. Art historian Rosenharte is compelled by the East German secret police to act as liaison with a British spy--they have arrested his brother's family--and finds himself caught in an endlessly recomplicated web of lies. It is more a question of how many factions Rosenharte can play off against each other before he is caught than of simple intelligence work--he lives in a society which is going into terminal meltdown, but the evil old men and their minions can still have people shot on a whim, for a few weeks more. This is a stunning evocation of the Cold War at its nastiest, and a salutary reminder of what it was about. Rosenharte is an attractive compromised hero--we find ourselves longing for this switchback plot to take him to safety and emotional fulfillment without any logical reason to believe that this is anything other than a story which is bound to end badly. In the end, hope is all he, and we, have.
