Period Pieces

After changing his name and re-creating much of his personal history, Patrick O'Brian moved to a village in southern France in a region called Catalonia, which spans parts of France and northern Spain. Among his earlier works as "Patrick O'Brian" is a short 1953 novel about a village in this region called The Catalans.

After a time journeying in the far East following World War I, Alain Roig returns to his home village of Saint-Féliu to find his family in turmoil. His middle-aged and respectable cousin Xavier, who is also the mayor of Saint-Féliu, is engaged to Madeline, the young daughter of a local grocer. The Roig family feels its property and wealth at risk from this threatened intruder -- who knows what silly ideas a middle-aged man may indulge for his young and flighty new bride, and how much those ideas might cost? Madeline's family, for her part, is none too pleased with the match either given the age gap.

Alain learns that Xavier hopes Madeline will save him from what he sees as his own lack of feeling, but as he winds deeper into the situation he finds that he is falling in love with Madeline, and she with him as she really does not love Xavier.

O'Brian's trademark wit is a splendid feature of his better-known Aubrey-Maturin series, and here it helps solidify the vision of a small town invested in its own small concerns as the great issues of the world. It has its own national and cultural flavor, but Saint-Féliu is the same sleepy small town that can be found in every corner of the world, staging its own version of the same kinds of drama playing in them all.

The wit and tone are probably The Catalans' strongest feature. While O'Brian uses his characters to explore ideas about how often people seek to use others to find what they think they lack in themselves, the story itself is a little light to carry much weight in that area. Alain is clearly drawn,  but Xavier and Madeline seem a little too much like stock characters added from the shelf and so the plot that rests on their triple base is unsteadier than it should be for best results.

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Len Deighton has had two major arenas for his fiction work -- the deep dark recesses of intelligence work in Cold War Europe and the battles of World War II. His 1993 novel City of Gold, set in a Cairo dreading the arrival of the brilliant German general Erwin Rommel, mixes the spy game of the former with an important but sometimes overlooked WWII theater.

Major Bernie Cutler has the task of ferreting out a spy who's been feeding Rommel detailed information about Allied troop movements and plans. Giving that kind of information to the Desert Fox is more or less handing him the keys to Cairo and to England's possessions in India, and Cutler's superiors are feeling the pressure to produce the agent or at least stop the leaks. So, therefore, is Cutler. But he has an additional source of stress: He's not actually Bernie Cutler, but a prisoner Cutler was transporting when he had a fatal heart attack, who has adopted Cutler's identity as a way of escape.

Other clandestine agents swirl in the mix of 1942 Cairo, from Zionists looking to establish a foothold in the former-and-future Israel to black marketeers whose only allegiance is to profit. Deighton has his usual deft hand at sketching out interesting characters with only a few bold strokes before sending them off into the narrative and his usual way with wry and world-weary dialogue. But City of Gold seems to have just a few of the pieces of a much more extensive work and a largely offscreen resolution that can make a reader check page numbers to see if something's been left out.

Obviously Deighton felt that enough of the story of City of Gold had been told that he could type "The End," but he needed to do more to show his readers why he thought so.