You could almost say Eric Ambler started what John Le Carre finished, and I would agree if it weren't for the fact that I've never encountered a dull paragraph in any of the eight or ten Eric Ambler spy novels I've read - from Cause for Alarm (written in 1938) to Doctor Frigo (written in 1974). Whereas, when I finally read John Le Carre's The Spy Who Came in From the Cold in 2007, I was so bored I can't recall if I finished it.
However, it was Le Carre's A Constant Gardener that reminded me to resume my Eric Ambler reading odyssey, because in fact the Le Carre book reminded me of the Ambler's writing style, much to Le Carre's credit.
The intrigues in Doctor
Frigo take place in the early 1970's and mainly on St. Paul,
a typical post-colonial island in the French Antilles in the Caribbean.
The lead character is a physician and a native, Ernesto Castillo, called Doctor
Frigo by many, whose father was a liberal/socialist who was briefly in power
before being assassinated twelve years previously. The plot revolves around the
return to the island of a leading figure from Doctor Castillo's father's
political party, to establish his bona fides to take over the government. This
politician is named Don Manual Villegas, and he arrives from Mexico where he
had spent the twelve years exiled by the junta that overthrew the narrator's
father and by the "civilian oligarchy" which superseded it. The
latter is falling; a rich offshore oil field has become potentially greatly
profitable due to rising international oil prices; and a large private oil
consortium, as well as the French government, is concerned. But the concerns of
Doctor Frigo are more personal: was Don Manual Villegas involved in or even
responsible for the assassination of his father, and what will he do if he
learns the answer is "yes"? Further, once Castillo discovers that
circumstances will not permit him to be simply the truthful, disinterested and
contented physician that he is, is he being set up, and by whom?
Which is only background. I say "only" because Ambler's true
foreground is his marvelous descriptions of his characters and renderings of
their conversations. As the book opens, the reader is struck forcefully by
Castillo's intelligence, meticulousness, and foresight; but then with each new
character whom the author introduces, the Doctor is portrayed as quite out of
his element with yet another person. Including the pompous local police
commissaire; the unflappable intelligence officer from France; the slimy
representative of the international oil cartel; and the personages -
intelligence, governmental, and clerical of the remnants of the civilian
oligarchy; as well as many others, including the Doctor's lover, a Hapsburg
Dynasty expert-and-descendant who repeatedly mocks him by attributing to him
the characteristics of various long-deceased idiots and incompetents of that
most pertinacious royal house.
The ending comes as a resolution, not a surprise. And on the next-to-last page,
Eric Ambler articulates in a conversation his masterfully condensed description
of post-colonial, Caribbean regimes in the 1970's, which could also serve as
the most charitable interpretation of America's condition in early 2009,
after eight years of King George Bush the Second.
Doctor Frigo is talking to a Monsignor, who says: "I am not offering the Church as an escape hatch, Don Ernesto, any more than you, I would think, would offer Democratic Socialism, whatever that is. No government, however well-intentioned, can do things for people without also doing things to them."
- "Forgive me, Monsignor, but that is part of a psychological platitude.
The rest of it is that you can only do things with them. Comforting but
meaningless."
- "Not entirely I think. It was Father Bartolome's view for a while. He
did much good among his people then."
- "You surprise me, Monsignor."
- "Oh, of course, he became corrupt and disgraced us all. It's so easy.
Easy for priests, but even easier for governments."
