The Charm School

This one was a re-read for me of a title that just had to be added to my ebook collection when the price was right. When it first came out many years ago, it quickly vaulted to the top of my favorites list in the thrillers category, and the passage of time (and a couple of minor edits by DeMille) has done nothing to lessen my love for this one. It's simply a great thriller. Excellent premise, excellent characters, excellent narrative, excellent pacing. The only downside is that it lacks the standout quality of dialogue of most of DeMille's other works. But then again, I consider DeMille to be unsurpassed at writing zippy and simply awesome dialogue, so even a relatively poor effort from him is going to be much better than most others' show more best efforts. The other thing that stands out in retrospect is that DeMille's poor regard for the CIA is nothing new, as the agency is shown here to be willing to go to great lengths to be messed-up when not being downright evil. In the end, though, if you want a classic espionage thriller, you can hardly go wrong with this one. show less

Well written and researched always engaging, initially the book is part unexpected gentle sweet love story, part clever cold war espionage tale, and all the while somewhat depressing tour of Russia especially Moscow, then it becomes one of the most gripping thrillers I have ever read with heart in your mouth tension.
Completely recommended.

Set in late-1980s Russia, this political thriller is about US diplomats’ discovery of “Mrs. Ivanova’s Charm School” -- a Russian spy school* that trains KGB agents to pass as Americans and live in America.

The Soviet Union has dissolved since the novel’s publication, and the periods of good/bad US relationships with Russia have cycled the novel’s relevance up and down over three decades. I’ve gotten 200+ pages into it at least twice, but this time, I sidelined my tightly bound mass-market paperback in favor of an e-book. I always enjoy DeMille, and here got a sense of a sad, tragic (and dangerous) Russia. And, as usual after spending a long time in a big book, I missed the setting and characters for a couple of days after I show more finished.

* The school is staffed by American pilots who were shot down during the Vietnam War, were traded from Vietnam to the USSR in the ‘70s, and who are still officially listed as missing-in-action. It’s based on a rumor of such a school/prisoner trade that DeMille learned of while he served in Vietnam. The idea of KGB agents passing as Americans is also the premise of a recent-ish TV series, The Americans, which I’m now interested in watching. show less

3362. The Charm School, by Nelson DeMille, (read Oct 21, 2000) Because I was so taken by DeMille's MayDay (read Sept 24, 2000) I read this 1982 book. This is a Cold War spy story, fantastic and filled with a high level of tension. I had reservations about the central couple (the very religious woman panting for adultery, the married man succumbing to her panting), and the right-wing slant to the plot but this was very easy to read and its 533 pages slid by effortlessly.

When you think about it, the demise of the Soviet Union also brought about the end of an entire genre of fiction, the Cold War melodrama. Some of the greatest books of the second half of the twentieth-century were devoted to this subject (The Manchurian Candidate comes to mind) and then one day, it was all gone.

This list would not be complete without a mention of Nelson DeMille's The Charm School.

A recent college graduate in Russian studies gets a gift from his parents of a trip to Russia. He takes a wrong turn – a very wrong turn – and after stumbling around a while in the dark in what he thinks is a military installation, he hears a Texas drawl.

If you've read the book, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, well show more . . . you know what to do. show less

The Charm School

Nelson De Mille is best known for his lengthy (often 500-plus pages) thrillers and his extensive research. For example, in his novel 1CThe Lion, 1D which included an act of airline terrorism, Nelson wrote about the unit of the New York Port Authority Police Department that is nicknamed Guns and Hoses because members of the unit are trained as both a Swat team and as firefighters. In 1CThe Charm School, 1D DeMille has studied Russian geography, culture and language (you want to know how to say obscenities in Russian? This book has them.) and even how to fly an Mi-28 Soviet helicopter. (The level of detail in the description of flying the copter partly explains the length of this book.) DeMille is above all a crafty show more storyteller. From the first chapter, 1CThe Charm School 1D adumbrates one after another variation on the mythic hero 19s journey made familiar by Joseph Campbell in books like 1CHero with a Thousand Faces. 1D

In the last years of the Cold War, American tourist Greg Fisher is about to drive from Smolensk to Moscow in his Pontiac TransAm 14a car that no Russian who sees it is going to forget, of course. As he is about to set off on this journey, his Soviet Intourist guide, like a mythical harbinger, warns him that he must arrive in Moscow before dark or he will get into big trouble, and she advises him not to take any detours even though he is authorized to take one. Naturally, Fisher takes his detour to see a famous battlefield, gets lost trying to find his way back to the highway, and arrives in Moscow after dark. Under virtual house arrest in his hotel for this 1Citinerary violation, 1D Fisher makes a desperate call to the U.S. embassy in Moscow because his side trip involved more than getting lost: Fisher met an American Vietnam War POW on foot near the Borodino battlefield.

Fisher 19s phone call launches heroic adventures for the rest of DeMille 19s cast of characters: Lisa Rhodes, a U.S. Information Service officer who takes his phone call, Defense Intelligence officer Col. Sam Hollis, and CIA Station Chief Seth Alevy. Hollis immediately goes on his own heroic journey to try to rescue Fisher. In contrast to Fisher, Hollis is an experienced hero, which explains why he is able to return to the world of the living battered but alive, while Fisher seems to have disappeared without a trace.

Rhodes begins her own journey into the underworld when she and Hollis travel to a morgue to recover Fisher 19s body. Like Fisher, Rhodes is not a veteran hero, but with Hollis as her guide and ally, she survives when their mission goes awry. Alevy at first seems to be a somewhat ambivalent figure until he proves to be an ally when he rescues Hollis and Rhodes after they get themselves in over their heads. Finally, in Part Five, the last part of the book, Alevy, himself, becomes the hero as he embarks on a final mission to rescue Hollis and Rhodes. (Alevy rescues them more than once.)

Of course, a heroic journey is not a heroic journey without adversity, preferably personified in a villain. Indeed, DeMille chooses as his epigram for Part Five this quote from JRR Tolkien: 1CIt doesn 19t do to leave a live Dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him. 1D The Dragon, at one level is the Soviet system itself, with its arbitrary laws that are used to privilege party members in general and the KGB (or Committee for State Security) in particular. The evil of the Soviet system is personified in KGB Col. Petr Burov a.k.a. Pavlichenko (which might be his real name while Burov might be his nom de guerre, or it might be the other way around). Burov is formidable, clever and treacherous. In short, a perfect villain. He has a human side, too, it is explained: He believes his harsh worldview is the only true way of life and the best way to protect his wife, mother and small daughter.

DeMille does not neglect to ask deep questions between the thrills. There is much discussion among the characters about the Russian character, which ironically seemed to support both the czarist tyranny and the Soviet one. From the outset, the Soviets proposed to create a new man for their new system, but instead preyed on the same weaknesses and fears as their predecessors. (I believe the irony is universal: socialism, fully instituted, is nothing more than neo-feudalism with the empowered elites patronizing/terrorizing the powerless people.)

Writing before the collapse of the Soviet Union ( 1CThe Charm School 1D is copyrighted 1988), DeMille has studied the then-current expert opinion on the Soviet Union and demonstrates far better than any non-fiction book or article I have ever read why Western experts did not see the collapse coming. At one point, DeMille has his hero, Hollis, make a mental note of the fact that among other evidences of decay and demoralization, he has not heard any Russians call each other 1Ccomrade 1D in years. But he writes off all of this evidence by simply saying that the Soviet system had seemed to be collapsing for many decades and no doubt would continue to seem to be collapsing for decades to come. So as the signs of imminent collapse increased, Soviet experts just discounted it as more of the usual demoralization that never before had seemed to affect the stability of the Soviet regime.

DeMille tells a ripping good story with plausible details, plenty of action and a couple of de rigueur hot sex scenes, but there are also a few plot holes that invite the passage of the huge submarine in Tom Clancy 19s 1CThe Hunt for Red October. 1D Early on it is revealed that the central conceit of 1CThe Charm School 1D is that the Soviets have a spy school where Soviet agents are trained by U.S. Vietnam War POWs to behave exactly like Americans. Dubbed by the captive instructors 1CMrs. Ivanova 19s Charm School, 1D the facility is located near the Borodino battlefield, just a couple of hours drive west of Moscow. The American spies, Hollis and Alevy, are shocked and surprised to find that such a school exists, both because of the basic mission of the facility and because of its use of missing U.S. military pilots and aviators.

First of all, the notion that American spies would be surprised by this idea is belied by the fact that I first read of it in the 1960s; so it was not a new idea in the late 1980s when 1CThe Charm School 1D was published. Secondly, DeMille 19s idea of having only captive instructors creates the predictable problem that the instructors occasionally give the trainees false information, which could eventually trip them up while trying to pass for Americans in the United States. A better idea would be to enlist willing American communists either as the only instructors or at least to catch and correct any misinformation given by the captive ones. Thirdly, DeMille 19s fictional charm school is located in the heart of Russia a few miles from Moscow and near a tourist attraction. The legendary and supposedly real charm schools 14of which there are said to have been several, covering the languages and customs of dozens of Western countries 14were more sensibly located in relatively remote places such as the Ural Mountains or non-Russian Soviet Republics like Tatar and Tashkent. show less

DeMille was recommended on The Ultimate Reading List for World of Honor. I chose The Charm School instead because it's the favorite DeMille book of a friend whose reading tastes I trust. Mind you, this same friend feels conflicted about DeMille. She says she finds a misogynist streak in DeMille's novels and stopped reading him after Plum Island. This particular book, even though I was alerted to the issue the book didn't strike me as misogynistic and the major female character was capable and sympathetic. There were a couple of moments a bit jarring that way I might not have noticed if the issue hadn't come up. A remark of the female love interest that our hero shouldn't worry she's one of those "liberated women" who think they can do show more anything a man can, and my she does seem a bit clingy, and the man a bit all, who can understand women? But, not on the whole anything that bothered me.

The book is set in the Soviet Union right before the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet empire broke up. When, whatever the talk of glastnost, the cold war between it and the United States was still fairly chilly and people feared Nuclear war. Into that land comes a young American, Gregory Fisher. As he puts it, the "excitement of being a tourist in the Soviet Union, he decided, had little to do with the land (dull) the people (drab) or the climate (awful). The excitement derived from being where relatively few Westerners went...a nation that was a police state. The ultimate vacation: a dangerous place."

That pretty much sums up the appeal--and the excitement--of the novel itself. Fisher soon encounters a man claiming to be an American POW held against his will at "Mrs Ivanova's Charm School." The major premise is farfetched, but I have to give DeMille credit, he dealt with my major objections just well enough to suspend my disbelief for the course of the novel.

Soon three people at the United States Consulate are involved in investigating Fisher's claims. Lisa Rhodes, a press attache who loves the old Russian culture perhaps too much; Seth Alevy, the CIA station officer who hates the regime perhaps too much, and Colonel Sam Hollis, a defense attache who having served in Vietnam cares perhaps too much about the fate of missing POWs. None are objective, and the three have a messy entangled relationship with each other. But it's not so much those three characters as the portrait of the Soviet Union, it's Czarist past and the hints of the future to come that fascinated me.

Besides which it was an engrossing espionage thriller that not only never stopped being suspenseful through over 600 pages, but turned the screws with each part. And the twist at the end was pretty stellar. show less